


Hays Code Love Scene

by Aja, earlgreytea68



Series: Hays Code Love Scene [1]
Category: Shenanigans (Original Universe), Time Ravel (Original Universe)
Genre: Demisexuality, Gen, Hipsters, Pining, Shenanigans (Original Universe) - Freeform, Slow Burn, Theatre Kids, an endless series of rooftop bars, frenemies to lovers, so many theatre jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 16:33:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 88,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11763933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja, https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: “Hazel,” said Elliot solemnly, “for your podcast, I will adult harder than anyone has ever adulted.”“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Hazel.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of two main stories in what we are calling the Shenanigans universe. Our Dramatis Personae may be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11757003). The other main storyline may be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11763891). 
> 
> Thanks to consultingreaders, katythereader, and renn for reading and for tons of encouragement and invaluable feedback.
> 
> We suck at chapters but this fic is too long to post in one installment, so we have split it into two parts at a completely random place, sorry.
> 
> Thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy this madness!

**Prologue: Caroline Finds Out**

 

 

“Oh my god,” said Caroline when Jane told her the news. “You can’t leave us. You’re not  _leaving_.”

“That’s the thing about getting hired by Google,” said Jane, trying not to smile. “You have to go work at Google.”

“But isn’t Google kinda like a cult?” said Caroline. “You’re going to have to, like, vow eternal enmity against Mark Zuckerberg while the little Android robot looks on smiling creepily at you.”

“No, that already happened, it was part of the final interview.”

“Well, shit,” said Caroline, and Jane burst out laughing. They were skyping and Caroline was sitting sideways in her dad’s massive La-Z-Boy, cuddling an afghan with her legs curled on the seat beside her. She kept running a hand casually over her calves like she’d recently shaved them and was enjoying the smoothness, and Jane kept thinking that if she were at all interested in sex and Caroline were at all interested in girls she would probably have tried her luck years ago.

“What are we going to do without you?” said Caroline. “Who’s going to come bring me donuts when I have to work the morning shift? Who will help me figure out what’s wrong with my photo composition?”

“Look, if you haven’t figured out basic camera angles by now,” said Jane, and Caroline waved an airy hand at her.

“Fine, fine,” she says. “But who will tell me all my ideas are brilliant and conveniently forget about the time I took too much Nyquil and tried to have sex with Sumner’s statue?”

“No one is forgetting that ever,” said Jane. “But probably Elliot.”

“God, what is Elliot going to do? He’s going to fall to pieces without you here to rein him in.”

“I love that you think I’ve ever been able to rein Elliot in.”

“You’ve done more than any of the rest us.” Caroline looked over at her laptop at Jane. “And seriously, who else is going to babysit him? Not Nicholas. He won't have time.”

“Nicholas is fine,” said Jane. “Elliot listens to him.”

“Pfft,” said Caroline. “God, remember when Elliot and Nicholas stole my flapper costumes from  _The Boyfriend_ and wore them to the drag show?”

“You  _loved_ that, though,” Jane reminded her. “You used up at least three film rolls on Nicholas’s cleavage.”

“Right, and then Elliot fell in the fountain and ruined the dress I needed for the big party number, and all Nicholas would say was, ‘Come on, Caroline, no one lost an eye.’”

“I don’t think he said it like that,” said Jane.

Caroline sent her a most expressive eyeroll. “That was a perfect impression. That’s his, like, oblivious Elliot defense voice.”

“You say that like we don’t all have oblivious Elliot defense voices,” laughed Jane.

“I do not,” Caroline said primly. “I defy you to name one time I’ve ever used an oblivious Elliot defense voice.”

“When the two of you decided to make Paris Geller Everclear cocktails for the  _Gilmore Girls_ watch party,” said Jane. “Kate passed out—”

“Oh, right,” interjected Caroline, sounding guilty. “Oh, poor Kate, I always forget about her.”

“Kate passed out and you were like, ‘Okay, but that’s the most Paris thing ever.’ And then you both high-fived.”

“Dammit,” said Caroline. “Fine. You know who doesn’t have an Elliot defense voice? Jonah.”

Jane straightened. “Does Jonah even count, though?” she said carefully. “He’s been away so long, I don’t think he’s even  _seen_ Elliot since he got back.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “You’re not forgetting how things left off with them, though. That whole weirdness with him breaking his lease.”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Jane said. “Why were we all so sure that was about Jonah and  _Elliot_ having a falling out and not Jonah and Nicholas?”

“Okay, because, first of all, Nicholas is completely incapable of having falling-outs with people,” Caroline said fervently. “And secondly, because—” she made a sound like two cats hissing at each other. “Jonah and Elliot.”

Jane had to laugh. “Okay, this is all... not  _not_  true, but I think Jonah still has an Elliot defense voice. His is just... rarer.”

“Right, I’ll listen for it during all the time they spend never speaking to one another again,” Caroline said.

“I’m just saying,” said Jane. “Jonah can surprise you.”

“If you say so,” said Caroline, and she sighed. “In that case, clearly there’s no hope for any of the rest of us, which returns me to my original point: you can’t leave, everything will be a disaster without you.”

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Jane said, and this time she knew she was smiling.

“You have to fix it so you can come back constantly.”

“You do realize you can skype California, right?”

“But it won’t be the  _same_.”

“You’re skyping me right now.”

“But that’s because there is the promise of non-virtual Jane later,” said Caroline. She tugged one strand of hair down over her eye.

“For you, there will always be the promise of non-virtual Jane,” says Jane, and fuck it, she was grinning.

Caroline held her hand out like a gun and fired it at her. “Damn straight,” she said.

Then she added, “But Elliot is seriously gonna miss you to pieces,” and Elliot clearly wasn’t the only one, but Jane didn’t bother to correct her.

 

 

**Like Some Sort of Hays Code Love Scene**

 

Jane told Elliot on a Tuesday afternoon, a bright golden day in mid-April when the setting sun was approximately the same shade of coral as the bubblegum-tini Elliot was drinking. He was wearing Tom Ford under a pair of suspenders paired with his skinniest, hottest jeans, and Jane was wearing a few of the endless variants and textures of white in her wardrobe. She had somehow intimidated the bartender into letting her smoke on the rooftop with just a single lift of her huge sunglasses and a casual dropped reference to that time she’d carried on a Skype flirtation with a member of Big Bang. Jane treated smoking like a glamorous lost art, and Elliot was basking in the thought of what perfectly beautiful people they were, what a perfectly Instagrammable moment this would make if only Caroline or someone else with a camera were around to capture them in all their aesthetic glory, when Jane blew a perfect smoke ring and said:

“So. Google wants me to come to California.”

Jane’s Google interview had been going on for a few weeks, and even though Elliot vaguely knew it was a big deal for a company like Google to be flying Jane out for interviews a few times a month even before she technically got her master’s in another month, Elliot had not actually stopped to consider that the end result of all that would be Google air-lifting Jane out of his life to California.

But it made sense, he realized. After all, she’d taken him to their favorite gastrobistro to break the news, the one with the rooftop deck that looked over Harvard Square, the one with the super-syrupy mojitos that Nicholas loved so much. That must mean she was serious.

“You’re going to go,” he said. He huffed. As if Jane, with her fancy in-demand developer skills and her perfect taste and her portfolio of Paul Thomas Anderson fanvids on Vimeo needed _Google_. As if Jane needed  _Google_ to come snatch her away from Boston and Blake’s weekly-monthly parties and karaoke nights and Elliot and their shenanigans. And Elliot.

“You know we didn’t really have hipster shenanigans, right,” Jane said when Elliot voiced this opinion. He was looking around the rooftop and thinking about the memories they’d made there over the years. The night Nicholas had gotten his MCAT results, he’d dragged Elliot there and consumed mojitos steadily until Elliot had blurted, shocked, “Hold on, are you actually drinking those things because you  _enjoy_ them?” and Nicholas had answered by kissing him deep and cool and minty-sweet, passing out, and then forgetting the whole thing had ever happened.

“We had  _so_ many hipster shenanigans,” Elliot protested. “We’ve had  _years_ of hipster shenanigans.”

Jane took a drag on her cigarette. “I have, occasionally, deigned to watch while you told yourself you were having shenanigans.”

“That is an untruth,” Elliot argued. “I watched you change your laptop background to that  _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ wallpaper. That was all you.”

Jane pursed her lips.

“And,” Elliot continued, vindicated, “you totally stalked that one Minecraft artist on Reddit until you got him to make you a game build around digging up photos of Miranda July.”

Jane chuckled. “Ha. Yeah. That was pretty great.”

“Which, like, if you’re too hipster to embrace your past, that’s fine,” Elliot dug in, “but at least let me mourn the loss of our adventures.”

Jane narrowed her eyes and considered him over her sunglasses. “This is different,” she said. “I’ll be in California, adulting and shit. I even took the glitch art off my portfolio.”

“The ghost of William Gibson is so disappointed in you right now.”

“I’m pretty sure William Gibson is still alive.”

“What, really?”

“Think so. Maybe cyberpunk makes you immortal.”

“That is patently false, or Philip K. Dick would still be among us.”

“How do you know he’s not?” Jane lowered her sunglasses with a significant look. “He could be a replicant.”

“Good call,” Elliot conceded. “Very good call.”

Jane smiled. “The point,” she said, “is that I won’t be around to keep you from getting bored, or distract you from whatever passes for an existential crisis in that Elliot head of yours.”

“I do not get existential crises,” said Elliot loftily.

“Heard from Jonah lately?” Jane asked blithely.

Elliot cast her a betrayed look and bit savagely into a carrot. Jane looked smug.

She kicked back in her chair and regarded him calmly, her cigarette — she refused to vape, which baffled Elliot; a silver vape pen would have made her whole aesthetic that much more minimalist and on-point, even if the whole trend was a smidge too en vogue for someone like Jane — dangling between her fingertips. It was a pose forbidding enough to deter every Boston waiter who would have otherwise reminded her that there was no smoking in Boston, and she was very good at holding it.

“I’ll be back every other month,” she said. “ _Not_ to check in on you. Or your people.”

“My people,” Elliot repeated.

“Your people,” Jane said with a handwave. “You know, you’ve got your whole sitcom ensemble. You’re losing your snarky BFF, it’s true, but you’ve still got the bromance with Nicholas, the former-girlfriend-to-friend thing with Caroline, your frenemy—”

“Don’t drag Jonah into my sitcom,” Elliot huffed.

One of Jane’s eyebrows went up. “I wasn’t referring to Jonah. I’ve barely seen Jonah since he came back from that swanky acting residency.”

“You’ve seen him?” Elliot blurted.

Now the other eyebrow went up. The bright sun kept dinging off her sunglasses and Elliot kept squinting into the glare. He persisted. “No seriously, you’ve seen Jonah since he’s been back in Boston?”

“Well, yeah,” said Jane, like this was just a given fact Elliot should have assumed. “He’s been out for drinks with me and Hazel a few times. Oh, and I met up with him and Nicholas a couple of weeks ago.”

“Him and  _Nicholas_?” Elliot gaped. “Why would Jonah want to hang out with  _Nicholas_?”

“Presumably because they used to be roommates and are still friends?” Jane said. Elliot winced. “Sorry,” said Jane. “I didn’t mean—”

“Whatever,” said Elliot. “It’s just—why wouldn’t Nicholas tell me? Why didn’t  _you_ tell me?”

Jane sent him a pointed look. Elliot sighed. “Right. Fine. Only I don’t know why Jonah suddenly has time to re-infiltrate our social circle, what with his busy schedule saving Boston theatre.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re making a bigger deal out of that  _Globe_ writeup than it actually was. Wasn’t he just one of a list of up-and-coming area actors?”

“He was the only one who was ‘our best hope to scatter the base contagious clouds looming over Boston’s Shakespearean scene,’” Elliot recited grimly.

Jane said, “It’s always a thing when a local comes back from New York to make good. The writer just wanted to make it a Prince Hal metaphor.”

“Whatever,” said Elliot again. Nothing could be further from a description of Jonah than Prince Hal. If this really were the sitcom of Elliot’s life, Jonah would be the intermittent guest cameo who’d get an inexplicable amount of cheering and wolf whistles from the live sitcom audience every time he walked through the set door wearing his fucking smoking jacket and lobbing a cryptic one-liner. But Jonah hadn’t been around them since he’d come back to Boston.

Well, no, apparently that wasn’t even true. He just hadn’t been around Elliot.

And Elliot supposed that was fitting.

After all, he’d left without saying goodbye.

“Who did you mean, anyway?” he asked.

Jane shrugged. “Hazel.”

Elliot snorted. “Right. Jonah in absentia.”  In the sitcom of Elliot’s life, Hazel would be Jonah’s snarky BFF, which would mean she mainly interacted with Elliot by being wryly unimpressed with him while she and Jonah traded significant looks over martinis.

“She’s not that bad,” Jane said.

Elliot scoffed. “Remember that time she complained I was drinking my cider wrong?”

“You were using a straw, Elliot, she spoke for all of us.”

“I had on a new dress shirt, I was being cautious!”

She smirked at him affectionately. He slumped in his seat. “Everyone’s scattering anyway,” he said. “You’re going to California, half our merry band is in New York, Blake dreams of getting called out to Chicago to do standup. Nothing gold can stay, ponyboy.”

“Okay, first,” Jane said, “You only lost like two people to New York, not half the band. Second, that’s what people do. You’ve all been graduated for like a decade.”

“Two years,” Elliot clarified.

“That’s what I mean,” said Jane. “It’s odd that you’ve all stayed this close this long. People get lives after college, they move on.” She snorted. “There’s your first problem. None of you have lives. It’s like Noah Baumbach froze you in time.”

“Don’t you daze and confuse me,” Elliot said. “I can leave the Seventies any time I want.”

“You know what I mean,” Jane countered, waving her hand around the column of smoke that billowed around her perfectly coiffed hair. “It’s like you all just want to be twenty-year-olds performing together forever. Theatre, podcast, whatever, it never changes.”

The deal with Boston was that the touristy spots had been touristy spots for centuries, and city height restrictions meant that if you got up so high, as they were just then, you could look down Mass Ave and see a good mile and a half of city stretched out before you. Elliot had always loved Boston for its clean, esoteric aesthetic, its epicurean sensibilities and its dedication to learning and good taste. It was the kind of city you could feel smart in, and Elliot often liked to feel smart.

But he looked down Mass Ave as Jane spoke, and the city’s crisp apple-red lines suddenly seemed muddier and grimmer. Strange that Jane would talk of things never changing even as she brought change with her, sleek and perfunctory as the notes she made in her Erin Condren Life Planner with her tiny Muji pens.

Maybe they  _had_ all stayed too close for too long. Maybe change was inevitably on the horizon and they would scatter to the four winds and Elliot would have to interact with new people and go on dates like a normal person and attain blowjobs through ways other than intermittently letting Jane set him up with people who were suitably clean and hot and not into shitty indie bands that banged bass drums on the downbeat and called themselves anthemic.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t #resist. He, Elliot, would ride this wave of change like Keisha Castle-Hughes. He would dig deep within himself to find the key to the art of socialization, the thing that would make his friends love this town and this life even more than they already did. He would create bigger, better, longer-lasting hipster schemes, and he would emerge victorious. He would—

He blinked. Jane exhaled a perfect smoke ring.

“Wait a second,” he said. “What podcast?”

****

So it turned out that Hazel wanted to make a podcast. And since Hazel and Jane were close, Jane knew all about the podcast.

Elliot hated not knowing something Jane already knew, much less not knowing two somethings in one day.

First, he disliked that it indicated a flaw in the perfect molecular structure of the first-water diamond that was the entity of Jane-and-Elliot. Second, he disliked that Jane was going away, so soon there would be plenty of things she knew that he didn’t, and vice versa. She hadn’t even  _left yet_ and she was already forgetting to tell him things. Major things, like  this podcast, whatever it was, and the fact that she had been off having  _drinks_ with  _Jonah_ —Jonah who was so busy and important you practically had to schedule him six weeks in advance just to bump into him in line at Starbucks. It was even worse that Jane and Nicholas had  _both_ been off having drinks with Jonah, and had  _both_ been apparently hiding it from him.

How long before they were all just playing casual catch-up and engaging in hollow chit-chat and painful small talk? How long before their lives fully diverged?

“You seem weirded out about the podcast,” said Jane, sipping her gin fizz with great relish.

“I’m not remotely weirded out about the podcast,” said Elliot, frantically signalling the bartender to bring him a Frenchy.

“Do you want to be  _in_ the podcast?”  Jane watched him hold a wordless exchange with the bartender in which he had to convince the bartender through the strength of his glare that, yes, he was serious about the Frenchy.

“Do you?” Elliot asked her.

Jane shrugged. “I’m already doing production design.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “That’s... that’s great. That means at least one thing about it will be respectable.”

“You don’t think Hazel’s capable of putting on a decent podcast?”

“Well,” said Elliot. “I mean.” He was highly skeptical that Hazel could handle such an involved project when her most elaborate creative endeavors to date had mainly involved hopping from one new agey workshop to another, all bearing lengthy names like “Rejuvenation through the Art of Potting Plants” and “Ceramics For the Soul,” and once, memorably, “KonMari and the Art of Menstrual Cycle Maintenance” that he strongly suspected had been sponsored by Goop.

He was torn between betrayal that Jane had joined with Hazel to involve herself with this impending disaster behind his back, wounded pride that Hazel hadn’t asked  _him_ to do production design when production design was basically his  _entire life_ , and faint hope that maybe this meant Jane would find excuses to be in town more than just once every few months.

“I think it could be good,” Jane said. “She’s got some interesting ideas for it.”

“Like what?”

Jane took a calculated sip of her gin fizz. “She wants to make it a Southern Gothic anthology podcast,” she said.

“Oh,” said Elliot. “Well, that’s...”

“...set in Antarctica,” Jane added.

Elliot slowly reached for his drink as his eyebrows slowly slid up. Jane took another judicious sip.

“Antarctica,” repeated Elliot.

“Technically that’s South,” said Jane.

“That’s...” Elliot decided to completely skip this argument and have it with Hazel herself later. “And why an anthology? That would be terrible for branding.”

“Why would she care about branding?”

Elliot scoffed, because what kind of podcast didn’t care about branding? Already this podcast was way out of hand. It needed him.

“You’re being maudlin,” Jane said. “You weren’t supposed to be maudlin.”

“I’m not being maudlin,” Elliot said maudlinly.

“It’s just a podcast,” said Jane, and Elliot thought if she didn’t get that it was so much  _more_ than just a podcast, then the fissures were already beginning to show.

Jane left him on the rooftop deck and said, “Don’t spend all evening drinking Frenchys,” like he didn’t have much better things to do than sit around all evening drinking Frenchys. It was like Jane didn’t even  _know_ him. See? The cataclysm of non-knowledge had already begun.

He sat there drinking Frenchys and Googling “podcasts” on his phone because suddenly he had friends who thought they were into podcasts. And sure, Hazel was the sitcom-frenemy friend, but they’d been friends for ages, ever since they first met at Emerson freshman year, along with the rest of their clingy little group. At the time, they’d all been involved in theatre, in their various ways, and though most of them had moved on from active involvement in the stage, none of them had moved on from each other. Well. With one notable exception.

He texted Hazel, bright and friendly.  _Hi! Haven’t caught up in a while! How are things?_

Hazel didn’t text back. Elliot ordered another Frenchy and set a timer on his phone for five minutes and when it went off and Hazel still hadn’t texted him back, he tried again:  _You heard about Jane, yes?_  He repeated the process with the timer and the text.

The bartender said, “Are you maybe having a very quiet breakdown and I need to call someone to come help you?”

Elliot looked at him, aghast. “Do I look like I’m having a breakdown?” That would have been way against aesthetic. He didn’t have  _breakdowns_.

“You’re timing your drink orders,” the bartender said. “And I’ve never seen anyone drink so many Frenchys in a row.”

“They’re two-toned,” Elliot pointed out, because obviously if you were going to spend the evening drinking, you should have an attractive drink to do it with. “Anyway, I’m awaiting a very important phone call.”

The bartender looked dubious.

“It’s about a podcast,” said Elliot. And then, because that statement really undermined the previous statement, he added loftily, “I am a social media manager,” because that was his go-to add-on for when someone looked at him dubiously, because the phrase “social media manager” generally confused people into believing you were a stable millennial with smart ideas and probably some connection to a trendy Brooklyn startup or two.

Sure enough, the bartender backed off and retrieved his next Frenchy, and Elliot thought:  _Of course_. He was a social media manager. Hazel’s podcast would undoubtedly need social media management.

His phone timer went off and he texted her again.  _I heard about your podcast. Call me!_

Forty-eight seconds later his phone rang.

“Elliot,” said Hazel, sounding wary in advance. Elliot put on his most charming smile. The bartender looked vaguely alarmed.

“Hazel!” he said. “I was just thinking about you. How are you this fine evening? Have you been SoulCycling?” he added, because Hazel’s latest thing was SoulCycle.

“Oh,” said Hazel. “Yeah, actually, I’m taking this interesting class that combines Zumba with—” and then she stopped, and Elliot could hear her audibly remembering who she was talking to over the phone. He huffed.

“That’s great!” he said, before she could backtrack too far. “I’ve always said Zumba principles should be applied to more kinds of athletic workouts. It’s like Yoga cycling. You’re ahead of the curve, Hazel, I promise you that.”

“What do you want, Elliot?” Hazel asked him, and that was Hazel for you, blunt and not easily sidetracked.

“You know, Hazel, it’s so good to hear from you,” Elliot said. “Why don’t we hear from each other more often?”

“You said you heard about the podcast,” Hazel said. “Is that why you were texting me?”

“It’s funny,” said Elliot. “I was just saying to Jane, ‘Jane, you know what would be good for our merry group of friends? Something new, some creative project to bring us all together. If only there were something unique and boundary-pushing, something fit for our collective genius. I just can’t put my finger on what.’ And then, what next, but Jane told me all about your podcast. Isn’t that amazing? It’s like a magical fairy of inspiration visiting us all at the same time.”

“...Right,” said Hazel, sounding like fairies were the furthest thing from visiting her at the moment. “Yeah, Elliot, I don’t really think the podcast is going to be a group thing, it’ll probably just be me and—”

“Say no more,” said Elliot, taking a long gulp of his Frenchy. “I know exactly what you’re thinking. You want an auteur production, something that lets you flex your creative muscles and explore characters on an intimate level to your heart’s content.”

“I haven’t even told you it’s a fiction podcast,” Hazel said.

“I know you,” said Elliot confidently. “Let me guess. You’re probably thinking something like  _Doctor Who_ in space, right?”

“ _Doctor Who_ is already in space,” said Hazel. “And anyway—”

“Right,” said Elliot, barging ahead. “And that’s exactly why you want something visionary and bold that’s not set in space, maybe something in our own world, something refreshing and invigorating and... southerly.”

“Elliot,” said Hazel impatiently. “Why are you asking about the podcast?”

“Because you’re going to need voice actors,” said Elliot, “and people to do sound effects and podcast editing, and help you write and craft the characters, and this is definitely a group project, Hazel. It’s  _our_ group project.”

“Actually, it’s  _my_ project,” said Hazel.

“Of course it is,” said Elliot, “and it’s also a way to galvanize our broken social scene.”

“Is it broken?”

“Well, it could use some patching,” said Elliot. “Jane’s leaving, all the actors went to New York, Nicholas is busy with med school, we’re  _drifting_ , Hazel. And you hold the key to uniting us all again.”

Somewhat to his surprise, Hazel didn’t answer right away. When she did, she sounded... less impatient than before. “That’s a nice thought, Elliot,” she said. “It is. But I’ve barely even begun thinking about the plots and the storylines and what I’ll actually need people to do, and I’m not sure—”

“So let us help you,” said Elliot. “Deep Ellum. Tomorrow. Bring your ideas for the podcast and summon us all.”

“That’s... really?”

“Are you kidding? They’ll love it. Blake is practically already standing on a chair reciting that  _Dead Poets Society_ poem to prove he can be a voice actor in your podcast.”

Hazel laughed, and Elliot took a celebratory drink of his Frenchy. He had her.

But then she said: “And you just want to, what, watch?” and Elliot recalculated. Best not to unveil his entire hand at once.

“I am but a curious bystander who wants to lend support in whatever way I can,” he said.

“You are the least bystander-y person I know,” said Hazel. “And I’m best friends with  _Jonah_ , which is saying something.”

“Ah,” said Elliot, because he’d temporarily forgotten about Jonah, and abruptly the dark possibility occurred to him that if Hazel came to Deep Ellum the next night then Jonah might also come to Deep Ellum, which meant that Elliot and Jonah might be in the same room for the first time in two and a half years, which was almost disconcerting enough to make him momentarily forget what he was aiming for.

“...just have a vague outline written but we can bring it tomorrow night,” Hazel was saying when he shook himself and tuned back in.

“That’s great, Hazel, just great,” he said. “You should put out the APB.”

“And you’ll make sure Nicholas can join us?” Hazel asked. “I miss Nicholas.”

“Yes, yes, everyone misses Nicholas,” said Elliot patiently. He texted Nicholas:  _Deep Ellum tomorrow night_.

Nicholas replied immediately, because Nicholas always replied immediately to Elliot’s texts.  _Sure. Occasion?_

 _I’ll tell you_ , Elliot answered.  _Be home shortly._

“He’ll be there,” he told Hazel confidently.

“Great!” said Hazel.

Something about the friendliness in her voice caused Elliot to blurt, out of nowhere, “And you’ll tell Jonah?”

“Jonah?” Hazel’s voice instantly regained all its wariness from before, and Elliot mentally kicked himself.

“I mean,” he said, floundering, “He’s been hanging out with Jane and Nicholas, he’ll want to see them—especially since Jane is leaving.”

“Right,” said Hazel. “But.”

“But?” said Elliot, suddenly feeling all his Frenchys hitting him at once.

“You're right,” Hazel said. “He'll want to see _Jane_ and  _Nicholas_.” Her words were oddly precise. Elliot wondered if she were suddenly feeling maudlin herself. Probably change was stressful for all of them.

“Excellent!” he said.

“Elliot,” said Hazel. “Don’t try and make Jonah part of your attempt at knitting us all back together. He has his own life.”

“I know that,” said Elliot, mildly outraged. “Of all things to know about Jonah, that is the thing I know most about Jonah. I didn’t even want him to  _be_ in my sitcom.”

“What?” asked Hazel.

“Nothing,” said Elliot.

“Fine,” said Hazel. “I’ll just... see you tomorrow. And so will Jonah. And we’ll all  _behave like adults_.”

“Hazel,” said Elliot solemnly, “for your podcast, I will adult harder than anyone has ever adulted.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Hazel, and she hung up.

If this were the sitcom version of Elliot’s life, then one of the studio’s two stationary cameras probably just cut to a shot of Hazel and Jonah sitting in a pub somewhere, toasting one another and smirking while the audience laughed uproariously.

“Classic Hazel and Jonah,” Elliot muttered, and summoned a Lyft to Nicholas' place.

  


Out of all of them, now that Jane was selling her condo to move to stupid Silicon Valley, Nicholas' apartment was the biggest. This was because Nicholas was a busy second-year med school student and he needed the room to, like, hold study groups and store his brain and copies of  _Gray’s Anatomy_ and stuff.

That is, his apartment was the biggest if you didn’t count Caroline and Blake, who had each moved back in with their parents at some point, or Elliot, who’d been haphazardly renting the apartment over the garage at his parents’ house in Newton since graduation, mostly because his mom really really wanted him to.

Nicholas, by contrast, had moved across the country to escape his nightmare conservative parents, who’d started out as Portland hippies but somehow gotten absorbed into Oregon’s storied tradition of racist survivalism. They were, however, super proud of the son who’d been accepted into BU med school, so even though Nicholas didn’t write home much, he still allowed them to bankroll his two-bedroom place in Quincy.

Quincy was a horrible place, but the apartment was rustic and homey, and Ian Purrtis would always come right up to Elliot and butt his head against Elliot’s shins, purring loudly while Nicholas offered him whatever random and exotic craft beer he happened to have in the fridge. Tonight it was a local cider Elliot had never heard of, but he sipped it dutifully while Ian Purrtis purred away on his stomach and Nicholas shuffled through his albums. Elliot threw himself down on the couch he’d helped Nicholas wrestle out of a garage in the Berkshires where it hadn’t been appreciated  _at all_ and complained about Hazel and Jonah.

“Imagine. The new  _Serial_ , brought to you by an HR assistant with dreams of getting paid to write fanfiction and—and the guy who directed a local high school production of  _I Remember Mama_ ,” he said. “Every feeling revolts.”

Elliot was looking up at the ceiling, but he could still vividly see Nicholas turn around and shoot him a pointed stare from across the room.

“‘Every feeling revolts?’”

“It’s Jane Austen,” Elliot said sulkily.

Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “Okay, there are so many things to dissect in that package of words,” he said, “starting with the fact that no high school has performed  _I Remember Mama_ since the ‘60s or whenever, and that you can never resist shaming Jonah for being a giant nerd even though, hello, you apparently secretly memorize Jane Austen.”

“Well,” Elliot sniffed, “memorizing it in front of you would just be weird.”

“Second,” and Elliot knew what was coming, he’d asked for it, so he shut his eyes against it. “I don’t know what the deal is with you and Jonah—”

“There’s no deal,” Elliot said, uselessly.

“I know it’s none of my  _business_ what the deal is between you and Jonah,” Nicholas said firmly. “That’s fine. But you always throw shade at him, you belittle all the hard work he does even though he’s been more successful than any of us  _and_ he did it without any help from anyone.”

Elliot unintentionally clenched his fingers in the ruff of Ian Purrtis’ neck. Ian Purrtis swatted a claw at him. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “God forbid Jonah let anyone forget for a second that his super-rich Cape Cod parents disowned him for being a flaming homo and now he’s a successful actor with a  _Globe_ profile so fuck them, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I mean, you act like you forget that part a lot,” Nicholas said.

“Yeah,” Elliot said. “But we all know I’m an asshole.”

“You’re not an asshole,” Nicholas said. And then he went silent, and Elliot knew what he was thinking and not asking.

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Jonah moved out and ditched us because I didn’t call him back for  _The Iceman Cometh_. Whatever, it was our senior year, we were all about to move out and move on anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it was that simple,” Nicholas said. “He really seems like the type to break a lease and leave the country over not getting a callback.”

“Fact-check, Kellyanne,” Elliot said, annoyed that he’d gotten himself into this conversation. “Jonah moved out of The Eggplant because his pride was hurt, and he was going off to do acting residencies anyway, and I guess he'd worked his way through every one-night stand at Emerson so he just decided not to waste any more time.”

“Okay, well, the walls were mauve, not purple, so it never should have been called the Eggplant at all,” said Nicholas. “Also, you kept hiding  _your_ one-night stands in Jonah’s room whenever Caroline came over because you didn’t want her to know how quickly you’d gotten over your Chandler-Monica thing, and you were obviously afraid Jonah was going to seduce them all because that’s what Jonah does.”

“Hang on,” said Elliot. “That one-night stand was  _one time_ and the walls were totally purple, but it makes sense that you didn’t notice that because you are terrible at noticing things, like  _Jonah flinging sex against everything and everyone at every opportunity_ , and—”

This time Ian Purrtis yowled and bit him. Elliot let him. He probably deserved it.

“Focus,” Nicholas said gently. “Podcast. It’s the same thing with Hazel. So, she loves to be creative, so why not just let her make her podcast? Why does this have to be a big deal?”

“It’s just  _weird_ ,” Elliot sighed, waving a hand. “We used to all do shit like this together. We used to  _be_ together. Now Hazel’s all, off with all her new SoulCycle friends or whatever, and she and Jane are tight, but she barely pays attention to the rest of us.”

“Oh,” said Nicholas. “Well. Maybe that’s the inevitable result of you having a giant obvious rift with her best friend that no one ever talks about.”

Elliot bit his lip. “It really wasn’t a rift,” he protested, even though he wasn’t sure what exactly it  _had_ been.

Nicholas sighed. “Look, Hazel hasn’t forgotten us,” he said soothingly. “You said yourself she was excited about coming to Deep Ellum tomorrow night.”

“So?” Elliot said sulkily.

“So, she’ll tell us about the podcast and it’ll be fine,” Nicholas said patiently. He stood up and grabbed an extra blanket from the ottoman behind the couch. It was one of the fuzzy chenille kinds and Elliot made grabby hands for it. Nicholas rolled his eyes and draped it over him, and Elliot drifted off thinking about all the potential podcast shenanigans in store.

****

Elliot woke up to Ian Purrtis sitting heavy on his chest and purring really loudly, and the sound of Nicholas doing something in the kitchen. He opened his eyes to find Ian Purrtis staring him down from two inches away.

“Good morning to you, too,” Elliot told him.

Ian Purrtis purred.

“Remember when I said I wanted to get a cat and you pretended you were allergic to them because you didn’t want me to get one,” remarked Nicholas as he came out of the kitchen with a bagel.

“That never happened,” said Elliot. “I  _am_ allergic to them.”

“You know that he sleeps on your chest all night whenever you stay over here, and you have never once had any adverse reaction to him.”

“I have silent allergies,” Elliot said. “Stealth allergies.”

“Right,” said Nicholas. “Well, I have to go to class, so don’t have any stealth allergic attacks until after I’m back.”

“They wouldn’t be stealth if I had them where you could see them,” Elliot pointed out.

“I’ll make sure to mark that down for my immunology final,” Nicholas said. “There’s coffee, and I stuck a bagel in the toaster for you already, just push it down, and make sure you cuddle Ian before you go, he gets sulky if you take off in the morning without a little cuddle.”

As soon as Nicholas had gone, Elliot promptly dumped out the pot of generic Trader Joe’s coffee he’d made and brewed himself a new pot from the organic Guatemalan roast Nicholas was “hiding” from him in the back of the coffee shelf. He dutifully picked Ian Purrtis up and rubbed his forehead with his nose, because as long as no one was looking it never happened, and he could just tip the dry cleaner extra or something to deal with the hair he was getting all over his new Blank Label. Ian Purrtis purred so loudly Elliot decided to keep the cat perched on his shoulder while he poured the coffee, grabbed the bagel from the toaster with his teeth, and wandered into his office.

His office was technically Nicholas' study, which was technically Nicholas' second bedroom which doubled as his med school library. Still, somehow over time Elliot had moved his own favorite laptop to Nicholas' desk, along with a few sets of work files, a caddy full of sharpened pencils to replace Nicholas' caddy full of Bics, and the Wacom tablet he used to futz around with social media graphics. He was a social media editor, which was a job most people thought was a joke when he said it out loud; but he got to spend all his time convincing people that most of their marketing decisions were gaudy, bespoke no understanding of the internet, and were likely to confuse search engines, which was a decent way to get paid.

Cat now settled in his lap, Elliot rolled up to the desk and set about politely informing a client that they did not need to spend an extra hundred grand signing up for Tumblr’s marketing services when they could already post shit on Tumblr for free. This was followed by an email in which he had to re-explain to them what Tumblr was and what one could use it for.

Elliot was, frankly, quite good at his job, which was why the companies he worked with were all too happy to let him keep his own hours and work remotely. He sent the email and looked down at Ian Purrtis, who obligingly sniffed his face.

“I’m good at my job, Ian Purrtis,” Elliot said. “Does Hazel think I’m bad at things? Does she think my love of shenanigans has rendered me non-podcast-worthy? I’ll show her. I’ll be the  _most_ podcast-worthy. Starting tonight.”

“Mrow,” said Ian Purrtis, which was probably cat-speak for,  _Okay, but you know Jonah will be there, too_.

“Whatever about Jonah,” Elliot told Ian Purrtis.

****

Elliot showed up to Deep Ellum with a game plan firmly in place. His plan was as follows:

  * He would be very mature about Jane’s fantastic opportunity and not make it All About Him, because now that he had been given time to absorb it, he had decided to take it all in such good grace that each of his friends would be shocked, and they would all talk about his graciousness amongst themselves, and they would thus say unto Hazel: “Isn’t Elliot being, like, so chill about this Jane thing? Verily, he is a being of pure benevolence,” and Hazel would have to rethink her views on Elliot’s podcast suitability. 


  * After impressing everyone with his maturity over Jane’s departure, he would segue into a conversation with Hazel about her podcast, in which she would be reminded that his excellent taste and undeniable charm was exactly what her nebulous podcast needed to rescue it from what might otherwise be a tragedy.


  * He would be completely calm about seeing Jonah again. This item technically wasn’t directly pertinent to the carrying out of his Scheme, but it would make things easier, and therefore it went on the list.



Hazel wasn’t there yet when he arrived, but it didn’t matter, for his plan was immediately sussed out by Caroline, who stopped cooing over the deviled eggs she and Blake loved so much at this bar and said, “You’re up to something,” five minutes after he sat down. Elliot narrowed his eyes at her.

“He can’t be up to something,” Blake said. “He’s losing his shenanigans partner.” Jane stuck her tongue out at him.

“See,” said Elliot, pointing accusingly at Jane, “I  _told_ Jane that we had shenanigans! Everyone knows we had shenanigans! She’s in denial about it.”

“You could just not do shenanigans,” Jane suggested.

“Be  _shenanigan-less_?” said Elliot. “We might as well just give up and buy minivans and start drinking Budweisers and wearing clothes from Target.”

“You have a very specific fear of your future,” Jane said. “It’s very well-articulated.”

“Elliot thinks anyone over the age of 25 is in perpetual danger of turning into a suburbanite GOP voter with two cars and stock options,” Caroline said.

“It is a fate I have thus far narrowly avoided,” Elliot agreed. “A fate I have thus far kept you all from.”

“Wouldn’t that, by your own logic, be because none of us are yet over 25?” Blake asked.

“Look here, you,” Elliot said, and then, as a thought occurred to him: “Hey. You’re an actor.”

Blake raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested Elliot’s clever subtle subject change was not as subtle and clever as he had hoped. “I occasionally say words onstage when I’m not emceeing karaoke for the local Applebee’s.”

“You  _don’t_ emcee karaoke for the local Applebee’s,” said Caroline.

“Shh, don’t crush my dreams.” Blake swirled his finger around the middle of his deviled egg yolk paste, then licked away the ensuing dollop with a flourish. “Although, what I really want to do is direct.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “Why are you even asking Blake about acting when Jonah’s the pro?”

“Thank you, Caroline, for your support,” said Blake.

“For that matter,” Jane inserted, “Why are you asking about acting at all?” She sipped her drink. “Are you talent scouting for Hazel’s podcast?”

“Her what?” asked Blake. “Hazel’s making a podcast?”

“That’s why we’re all here,” said Elliot. “Didn’t you see the group text?” Blake shrugged, which in Blake-speak could have meant anything from ‘I never read the group texts’ to ‘my phone is currently in the stomach of a large bird of prey.’ “ We’re going to help Hazel plan her podcast.”

“Was this your idea?” Jane asked.

“I may have suggested to Hazel that we would all be more than happy to help her plan her podcast,” said Elliot. “And what goes better with planning than drinks at Deep Ellum?”

 _Now_ Caroline finally looked impressed. “I think that is such a great idea,” she said. “I love podcasts. I listen to  _Serial_ and  _The Moth_ , like, all the time.”

“Caroline, where’s your sense of pride?” Elliot grumbled. “You can’t just pick the two most mainstream podcasts there are and say you love podcasts.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure she can, and that’s why they’re mainstream,” said a voice behind him, and Elliot’s stomach plunged a few thousand meters.

“Jonah!” said Jane, smiling at him.

“Our adventuress,” said Jonah expansively. “ _L'avventuriera_.” It was the extravagantly rolled R’s that finally got Elliot to turn around.

He looked exactly the same, which was a pointless observation, because it wasn’t as though Jonah at 24 would be substantially different from Jonah at 22, and it wasn’t as though Intense Shakespearing produced physical changes. In his  _Globe_ profile photo he’d had different hair; currently he had it in an unfairly perfect side part, which made his whole face look as sharp and shrewd as ever. Elliot yanked his eyes away, and then reluctantly glanced back, because surely it was rude not to make eye contact with someone you hadn’t seen in over two years, but just as he looked back in confusion Jonah’s eyes slid from Jane over the rest of the table, an all-encompassing glance that seemed to take in everyone else just as surely as it excluded him.

“Thank you, Jonah,” said Jane, toasting him with her gin fizz. Elliot sat there, silently mortified, while everyone else at the table greeted Jonah like they’d just seen him last week. Because, of course, they probably all  _had._

Elliot swallowed. Right. He was going to be chill.

However, Elliot had planned the whole ‘being chill about Jonah’ part of his strategy without taking into account the limited seating at Deep Ellum. Usually they managed to commandeer one of the long tables in the back without having to resort to the patio, but when they all got together, it got uncomfortably squished, or else someone wound up standing.

Currently, the only vacant seat left was next to Elliot. Elliot scooted in next to Jane. Jonah sat down on Elliot’s other side, and Elliot attempted to smile a perfunctory smile at Jonah without really looking at him, only this time Jonah was glancing back and Elliot tripped and fell into holding his gaze, unable to break away without looking rude, and Jonah’s expression was completely opaque and perfectly polite as he said mildly, “Elliot.”

Elliot had every intention of greeting Jonah with something non-mundane and smart, but everything he thought of just sounded clumsy, so instead the words all got stuck in his mouth, and Jonah probably just thought Elliot was being rude anyway, because he leaned forward as if Elliot weren’t there and said to Jane with a smile, “It’s been far too long since I’ve seen you, and now you’re going away. That’s tragic.”

Jane sent him a smile. “You’ll just have to come visit me,” she said.

Jonah gave a hearty laugh and said, “Silicon Valley has very few theatre opportunities, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my best to find some excuse,” and Elliot reminded himself that having a loud fake laugh wasn’t really a cardinal offense. Right, he thought. Stick with the plan. Impress everyone by being mature and unfazed.

He slung his arm around Jane, who looked startled. “You know, I was just saying that to Nicholas,” he managed to wedge into the conversation. “I was just saying that it’s been  _so_ long since we’ve seen Jonah.”

“Nicholas and I have seen each other quite a bit lately,” Jonah said, somehow managing to direct his comment at Jane instead of Elliot. He straightened in a way clearly designed to show off how rigid and well-formed his posture was, because he was always about to break into a soliloquy or something at any given moment, and people who gave monologues didn’t do them while slouching. “His commute takes him by this school where I’m guest-directing  _Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat_ , so we’ve been grabbing drinks a couple of times a month.”

“Yeah, I joined them for drinks with Kate like last week,” said Blake, and even though Elliot knew, logically, that the reason for everyone keeping this news from him was that for some absurd reason  _everyone_   _thought he was weird about Jonah_ , he still had to battle back a wave of feeling betrayed. Nonsense.

“Isn’t it a high school?” Caroline asked. “Is this your first time working with high schoolers, Jonah? Are they wee and precious?”

Jonah laughed. Elliot abruptly looked away from him and examined all the pink drinks on the cocktail menu while Jonah told everyone all about how reluctant he’d been to direct a high school play, what with all his busy work being a professional shakespearean or whatever, until he actually met the students and saw how much fun they were having, and how relieved he was that he’d managed to find a group of 12 brothers who could all actually sing, more or less, and he threw in an amusing story about the high schoolers realizing how young Jonah was, and it was all so clichéd and expected and wholesome Elliot was going to eyeroll himself to death before Hazel even got to the bar.

As though it were actually  _hard_ to direct, anyway.

“Do you need any extra cast members?” asked Blake. “I could play a cow. There are cows in  _Joseph_ , right? Look, I could audition right now.”  He let out a very good moo, and everyone laughed.

“We’re full up on cows but I’ll keep your information on file,” Jonah said dryly.

“You could always typecast him as an ear of corn,” Elliot muttered. Blake registered this and laughed heartily. Jonah darted a glance over to Elliot and then away again, and Elliot felt his indifference like a slap. It was infuriating.  _He_ was being indifferent to  _Jonah_ , that was how this was supposed to work.

“I bet your students  _adore_ you,” Caroline said.

“I bet his students are terrified of him,” Jane said, smirking.

Jonah blinked at her. “Terrified?” he echoed.

Jane grinned. “We’ve all seen you go into your Hulk mode once or twice.”

“Oh.” Jonah seemed a bit taken aback. “I’d never yell at a student.” His lips suddenly twisted, and he added ruefully, “Only good friends get that treatment.”

Jane laughed. “To be fair, we probably deserved it. Remember when we stole the—”

“Don’t say it,” said Jonah, but he was trying not to laugh, and Elliot suddenly felt that everything was tremendously unfair, because it had been  _his_ idea to steal the—

“—the Aloysius bear,” Jane continued.

“Oh, my god,” Caroline interjected, “and you were freaking out because you’d been carrying that bear  _everywhere_ —”

“In my defense, I was method acting,” Jonah said, but he was openly laughing now, and Elliot had forgotten about Jonah’s laugh, how he had different laughs for different moments and this one was the slightly less performative ‘I’m embarrassed in polite company’ laugh that made him sound almost like a real human being instead of an Ac-Tor.

“—and you thought you’d lost it somewhere,” Caroline was saying, “and it was the final dress rehearsal, and Elliot had a courier deliver a note to you  _backstage_ —”

“Did he really?” Jane said, casting Elliot a proud glance. “I’d totally forgotten that part.”

“I will never forget that part,” said Caroline, “Because Jonah’s face when he opened this special delivery envelope and realized it was a ransom letter for a prop teddy bear is one of my top ten favorite Emerson memories.” She held up her drink and sent Elliot a silent toast, and suddenly they were all looking at Elliot, all of them except Jonah, who went tense beside Elliot, and screw it, Elliot probably should have just stayed home tonight.

His friends had obviously all momentarily completely forgotten about the giant Jonah-Elliot rift. He wished Nicholas was here to say something gracious and smooth over everything. Right, he thought. I am a mature human being, I am here to impress Hazel and get her to let me do social media for her podcast, not to relive fun times with Elliot and Jonah for the benefit of my well-meaning but misguided friends from college.

“Yes, well,” he said grandly. “Now that we’ve all revisited  _Brideshead_ , why don’t we ask Jonah to spill the details on Hazel’s podcast, hmm?” He smiled innocently at the group.

“Ooh! I want to hear about the podcast,” said Blake eagerly.

“Right,” Jonah said, still not looking at Elliot. “The podcast. I don’t think it’d be your thing.” He took a long gulp of whatever fancy red wine he’d ordered, because Jonah couldn’t just drink beer at a bar like normal people.

“No, really,” said Elliot, reaching for a sip of his pink nitrotini. “It sounds  _fascinating_.” He leaned in and put his hand on his chin and looked earnestly up at Jonah, doing his best to emulate a child waiting for storytime.

Jonah turned and gave him a real look, then, finally, one of those full-on looks of scrutiny Elliot remembered so well. It was almost comforting in a way. He didn’t know how to interact with a Jonah who wasn’t really speaking to him but whom he couldn’t really avoid. An amusedly scornful Jonah, on the other hand? Elliot was an old hand at dealing with that version.

“You know, I should really let Hazel tell you,” he said impassively. “And here she is, thank god. Hazel, tell them about the podcast.”

“Oh, the podcast!” Hazel said, as Jonah stood up quickly and let Hazel take the seat next to Elliot. That was a far better seating arrangement because it gave Elliot the opportunity to give Hazel a friendly one-armed hug. She looked as if she weren’t sure whether hugs were a thing they did or not. “You’re not going to like the podcast,” she said to him, returning it warily. The others protested this in chorus.

“Well,” she said. “Elliot won’t like it.” She turned to him. “You’re going to think it’s stupid. But it’s not. It’s a serious thing, Elliot.”

“I’m a serious person,” Elliot said earnestly, determining not to look the least bit surprised when Hazel said the word ‘Antarctica’ out loud. “So what’s it about, this serious podcast?”

“It’s experimental,” said Hazel. “Kind of a speculative sci-fi, high-fantasy, dystopian, psychedelic, horror, Southern Gothic, social commentary type of thing.”

Elliot blinked. Then he said, “That’s...You’ve just named basically every single genre there is.” Clearly this was a podcast that  _needed_ him. “You can’t... you can’t just... I mean, mash everything together like that, it’s going to be a jumbled mess—”

“It’s a  _genre_   _hybrid_ ,” said Hazel. “There will be overarching  _themes_  borrowed from different genres.”

“And social issues,” Jonah interjected, reseating himself by more or less wedging himself onto the bench opposite Hazel, which was clearly _not_ optimal because it gave him far too much opportunity to look coldly at Elliot, just like old times. “Didn’t you say you wanted it to be a queer podcast?”

“Right,” said Hazel. “We wanted every episode to feature queer and non-binary characters and characters of color because we need more of them in speculative genre fiction.”

“Is it a good idea to use marginalized characters as your nebulous theme?” said Elliot. “Isn’t that like using us as window dressing?”

Hazel took another long swig of her drink and then placed it drink gingerly back on the table, apparently concentrating quite hard on running her finger around the rim. “No, Elliot,” she said after a moment. “Turning queer characters and people of color into main characters is not window dressing, it’s representation. Tim is bisexual—”

“Who?”

“ _Tim_ ,” Hazel said. “My  _boyfriend_?” Elliot blinked. “You’ve  _met_ him.”

“Oh,” said Elliot vaguely. “Right. I’m sure I did at some point.”

“He’s here  _now_ ,” said Hazel, gesturing. Elliot looked. Some guy had seated himself next to Caroline.

“Hi,” said the guy, who was, apparently, Hazel’s boyfriend. Caroline patted his arm reassuringly. Elliot made a note to forget him again as soon as possible.

“And anyway, Tim is going to write it, so the podcast will be written by a queer man. And obviously Jonah is gay.”

“Why does that matter?” asked Elliot.

“Yes, why  _does_ that matter?” Jonah asked Hazel in some surprise.

Hazel blinked at him. “Because you’ll be one of the actors.” She paused. “Won’t you?”

“Oh,” said Jonah. He looked hesitant, which was a rare enough sight for him that Elliot leaned in to enjoy it. “I’m terribly excited about the podcast, and I want to support it any way I can, but between the play I’m directing and the one I’m about to start rehearsing at the Huntington, I don’t currently have a lot of extra time on my hands at the moment.”

Elliot bit the inside of his cheek and barely refrained from an eyeroll and definitely didn’t remind Jonah that he’d save hours of time if he didn’t have an endless coterie of twinks parading in and out of his apartment—which he assumed was definitely the case, since Jonah seemed unchanged.

“But,” said Hazel. “I was hoping you’d play the lead in one or two of the episodes. Maybe Tim can write you something short?”

Jonah gave her an affectionate smile and leaned down to give her a light hug. “I’d be happy to do something short and sweet,” he said. “But it’ll probably have to be a tiny walk-on role. Sorry.”

“Oh, please, don’t apologize,” said Hazel, and she started to give him some sort of sing-songy platitude about how busy and important he was and how of  _course_ it didn’t matter that he wasn’t going to be able to participate, but all of that was annoying, and Elliot was annoyed by the whole idea of Jonah bothering to come to this get-together tonight if he already knew he wasn’t going to be in the podcast. What could he have meant by it?

“So,” he said, breaking into Hazel’s Jonah praise. “You and your boyfriend are making a podcast. That’s great. You still haven’t told us what it’s about.”

Hazel gave him a long look, as if she suspected him of something. “Fine,” she said at last. “It’s called  _Time Ravel_ and it’s a fantasy science fiction podcast. The first episode is set in a post-climate change Antarctica, a hundred years or so from now.”

“...Okay,” said Elliot, draining his drink.

“That sounds promising,” said Jane. “What happens in Antarctica?”

Hazel and her boyfriend had pretty vague ideas about what happened in Antarctica, but they had a lot of interesting things to say about their first episode's main character, Sebastian, a loner who owned his own bookstore on a struggling outpost. “He’s a post-apocalyptic bookseller, he’s nerdy and world-weary,” said Hazel. “He’s like a more cynical version of me but male.”

“Hazel, they don’t make more cynical versions of you,” Elliot said.

“ _Anyway_ ,” said Hazel, narrowing her eyes. “One night a mysterious man enters the bookshop. He’s like your classic vaudevillian. Shabby patchwork coat, kinda Shakespearean. You know the whole trope.”

“Vaguely,” said Elliot, definitely not glancing at Jonah.

“Anyway, the man—he doesn’t have a name yet, I’ve just been calling him the Mysterious Man—is a time traveler who needs Sebastian to help him bring back an important political document from the 21st century. So they go time-traveling. The plan works. It’s all analogous to the current turbulent political times. New episode.”

“No,” said Elliot. “Not new episode.”

“Yes,” said Hazel. “New episode, we want it to be an anthology.”

“No, you don’t,” said Elliot. “This guy, Sebastian. He’s hot, sad, and looking for love, and in walks this enigmatic man out of time and space who wants to take him on adventures.”

They stared at him. “So?” Hazel asked.

Elliot huffed. “So let them go on adventures!”

Hazel frowned. “But we have so many more characters and plot themes we want to write about.”

“So use the frame story of Sebastian and his Mysterious Man going on adventures together to get to all those other people,” said Elliot.

Jonah broke in. “That sounds an awful lot like  _Doctor Who_ , and that’s exactly what Hazel  _doesn’t_ want.”

Elliot blinked, thrown by the abruptness of Jonah finally bothering to speak to him. “Then Hazel can have a podcast no one listens to,” he blurted.

“It’s Hazel’s story, Elliot,” said Jonah, his voice sharpening.

“Yes,” said Elliot, feeling his face heat in defensiveness, “and I get paid to tell people how to market their stories, so if Hazel is smart, she’ll listen to me.” He turned to Hazel. “Look, Hazel,” he said. “That’s your story. You’ve got the instant chemistry between Sebastian and the Mysterious Man—but they don’t know anything about each other so there’s all kinds of room for UST and flirting and conflict and backstory and misunderstandings and arguments and falling in love through mystery-solving and saving one another as they  _travel through time_. Tell all those other stories, too, but that’s what your fans will be listening for. They’ll feel betrayed if you don’t bring Sebastian back again, and you can’t break Sebastian’s heart and leave him stranded in the middle of eternity without his true love.”

“But they’ve solved their problem after that episode,” Jonah said to Elliot. “They bring back the document, the plan works.”

“No they don’t,” said Elliot. “Not if that document they bring back through time is just one of a series.”

“Like they have to collect all of them to jumpstart the events?” said Hazel’s boyfriend.

“More like... every document triggers a different necessary point along the timeline that leads to the resistance,” Elliot said.

“So they’re calibrating the elements to achieve the desired outcome,” said Jonah. “Every trip back in time they get closer, or further away.”

Elliot nodded eagerly. “Exactly. And in the meantime Sebastian’s finding out more about himself and his connection to the portal and falling more in love with the Mysterious Man. It works, Hazel, I promise. And you can still get your individual stories because each document—let’s call them freedom documents—will have its own side story.”

“Well,” said Hazel uncertainly. She looked between her boyfriend and Jonah. “I... I guess that could work. Maybe.”

“It’s your podcast,” said Jonah again, totally unnecessarily in Elliot’s opinion.

“Tim’s the writer,” Hazel said, glancing at her boyfriend. “It should probably be his decision.”

Hazel’s boyfriend was consulting his notes. “I like it,” he said after a moment. He pushed up his glasses and looked around. “We could have  _worldbuilding_.”

“Yes,” Elliot echoed. “ _Worldbuilding_.”

“But that means our cast of characters might have just grown considerably,” said Hazel’s boyfriend. “With an anthology we could repeat actors. We can’t get away with that as easily in a narrative series.”

“Well,” said Blake, “I’d love to be in your podcast.”

“Same,” said Caroline. “I can be a bit part or whatever you need.” Hazel finally stopped eying Elliot and flashed her a smile.

“Thanks,” she said, including Blake in the good will, too. “Of course you can be in it. We’d love to work with you guys.” And then, then, she looked back at Elliot again. “So,” she said, folding her arms. “Why are you so interested in this podcast?” she asked. “You don’t want to be  _in_ it, do you?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” said Jonah.

“What do you care?” Elliot asked. Apparently now that Jonah had stopped ignoring him he wasn’t going to leave Elliot alone. “You’re not even going to be in it.”

“I don’t,” said Jonah without inflection, “but I do remember that you don’t like to act, so I can’t imagine you’d abruptly start now.”

“Jonah, I act,” Elliot said distractedly, gulping his second nitrotini. “Do you remember, from us  _doing whole productions together_ , that I act?”  

“I do, in fact,” said Jonah. “I also remember, from  _having lived with you_ , that you complain constantly that acting is a mindless chore and that it would be much better if you were directing whatever production you happen to be cast in so you could save it from itself.”

He delivered all this with the aplomb of a bored weatherman.  _Ignore him_ , Elliot thought. He turned back to Hazel. “It’s just voice acting,” he said, even though he really didn’t want to voice act at all. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe he could let Hazel  _think_ he wanted to voice act, so that then she’d be doubly happy to offer to let him do the social media instead.

“I could voice act,” he insisted. “I’ve got Skype and a microphone, I’m all set.”

“We’re using a real recording studio for this,” said Hazel.

“Great,” said Elliot. “I’ll Uber on over.” Hazel looked unimpressed. “Lyft,” Elliot said. “I’ll take a Lyft on over, because while all car services are emblematic of toxic capitalist disenfranchisement and we’re all complicit in the inherent dehumanization of the gig economy, Uber is significantly more evil. So I’ll take a slightly more sustainable car company to your intersectional feminist queer podcast recording.”

Hazel stared at him.

Jonah’s lips quivered.

“But,” Elliot continued grandly, “I just want to support your podcast. I completely understand if you don’t want to utilize my talents at this time. I’m still going to be here for you.”

Hazel blinked. “That’s... nice of you, Elliot.” She sent Jonah an odd look.

“Don’t look at me,” said Jonah, sounding amused. “I’m the last person who should weigh in on Elliot’s ability to sit idly by on the sidelines.”

“Yes,” Elliot countered, annoyed, “since you haven’t actually seen me in two and a half years.”

Jonah held his gaze. “I haven’t actually been in the vicinity.”

“I know that,” said Elliot. “You went to Italy.” He heard the resentment in his voice, and was appalled, but if Jonah registered it, he couldn’t tell.

“I did,” said Jonah.

“And then you were in Atlanta. And New York.”

“I was,” said Jonah.

“And now you’re back,” said Elliot.

“Well observed,” said Jonah. He took a long gulp of wine.  “And you’ve been... at Nicholas’s.”

“I... guess?” said Elliot.

“And how is that going?” asked Jonah, and what the fuck did  _that_ mean?

“Hanging out at Nicholas’s place?” Elliot glanced down at his phone. Nicholas and Kate were apparently still blocks away, thank god. “His cat hasn’t eaten my face or anything, so I can’t complain.”

“I see.” Jonah seemed to be processing this, for some reason; his expression was oddly thoughtful, and Elliot had no idea what to make of it, so he barrelled ahead.

“The point,” said Elliot, “is that while you were off strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage—” Jonah actually  _smiled_ at that, which, like, that wasn’t the point— “I’ve been off being very busy and grownup.”

“Have you,” said Jonah.

“Yes,” said Elliot, waving a hand dismissively. “Target shopping. Minivans. Stock options. The works.”

“Minivans,” echoed Jonah, and now he was grinning at Elliot, and Elliot’s plan was all going terribly.

“I have driven a minivan,” said Elliot with dignity. “You see? You see what you’ve missed?”

Jonah was still holding Elliot’s gaze, and his eyes had gone warm, probably from the wine. “Yes,” he said. “I think I do.”

Hazel, looking back and forth between them, said uncertainly, “So you definitely  _aren’t_ into acting again,” to Elliot.

Elliot kind of hated this podcast. He kind of hated that it was the only shenanigan on offer at the moment, even if he’d just given it a most excellent boost towards greatness. And he kind of hated that even  _after_ his clearly brilliant turnaround, Hazel wasn’t willing to ask him to be a part of it.

Elliot looked back at Hazel without answering, because Elliot didn’t want to say,  _Yes, Hazel, please put me in your stupid podcast before it takes all of my friends away from me because I’m the only one not in your cast of thousands as you flailingly attack every genre that has ever existed_.

But Elliot was a good schemer, and part of being a good schemer was having another scheme in the pocket of your A.P.C. pants for when the first one went awry. And so it was that, just then, he found one—quite literally in his pocket as his phone buzzed with a text from his unwitting savior.

“No,” Elliot said. “But. You know who is? Nicholas.”

And Jonah, still watching Elliot’s face, broke away, said blithely, “Plus ça fucking change,” and drained his wine glass.

****

Blake said, “Nicholas isn’t even an actor, though. He’s a doctor.”

“He’s in med school,” Elliot said.

“Is there a difference?” asked Blake dubiously.

“I’m not getting into a debate about when doctors become doctors, Meredith Grey,” Elliot said. “We’re talking about a  _podcast_.”

“No, we’re talking about Nicholas acting again,” said Caroline.

“Exactly,” said Elliot gratefully. “And Nicholas  _is_ an actor. Nicholas' always been an actor. Just because he chose a very important career saving the lives of small children, just because he chose _selflessness_ over single-minded pursuit of any of his own dreams, doesn’t mean he’s not an  _actor_.”

“No one is saying he’s not an actor,” Hazel began.

“Far be it from me to state the  _blindingly obvious_ question here,” said Jonah abruptly, “but have you actually asked Nicholas if he even  _wants_ to do the podcast?”

And there it was. Elliot looked back at Jonah’s face and read everything he’d been dreading to read there since the night started.

It hadn’t been just any callback, was the thing.  _The Iceman Cometh_ had been an off-campus production done in fall of their senior year. Elliot, not to put too fine a shine on it, had spent his first three years at Emerson wowing the school’s directorial professors due to his excellent work in their classes, particularly when it came to scene staging. In spring of their junior year, he and Jonah had randomly wound up co-directing a scene together, and even though that professor had hated Elliot for reasons which would forever remain a mystery, he’d been so impressed with their work that he’d recommended Elliot’s directing proposal to the theatre guild.  _The Iceman Cometh_ had been Elliot’s directorial debut—to date his only directing credit; he’d gotten busy with work and stuff after college—and it had been kind of a big deal, locally speaking. It had ultimately won Elliot and the cast and the production crew a bunch of awards. He’d basically kicked ass.

If Elliot had cast Jonah as Hickey, the notoriously difficult lead in  _The Iceman Cometh_ , it would have been one of the biggest parts Jonah had ever played. Hickey was a huge part, both in terms of reputation and in terms of size; the actor who played him had to deliver nearly two hours of monologues. Jonah had auditioned, and Jonah was the star of Emerson’s theatre department, then in the middle of a string of lead roles. Everyone, including him, had assumed he’d be a shoo-in.

But Elliot had already had his heart set on giving the role to Nicholas. Asking Jonah to play an ominous showy trickster who could drop into a bar and puncture the self-delusions of everyone in it felt too on the nose to Elliot, like he’d have just been directing a three-hour production of Jonah starring as himself. And Elliot had—Elliot hadn’t wanted that at all.

But Nicholas’s audition had been great. As much as any actor so young could carry off O’Neill, Nicholas had seemed like the kind of guy who could read a room instantly and then mesmerize everyone in it, all while deluding himself most of all.

So Elliot had cast Nicholas, and Elliot had spent hours running lines with Nicholas, and even though Nicholas had been nervous about fucking it up, he’d been brilliant because Nicholas was always brilliant. And Elliot knew he’d been right because later Nicholas had won a regional theatre award for the role.

Elliot hadn’t called Jonah back for any role, though. Elliot hadn’t wanted to insult him by offering him a smaller part. And when Jonah found out, he had eviscerated him. He’d called Elliot selfish and told him he’d pushed Nicholas into doing a huge and difficult role he didn’t want and barely had time for, and that Nicholas was only doing it just to please Elliot. He’d accused Elliot of being deliberately cruel to both him  _and_ Nicholas, and he’d warned Elliot that one day he might hurt someone for real.

In the weeks after their fight, they’d passed into the thinnest show of polite indifference. Jonah seemed to mostly want to avoid talking to him at all, and when they did talk it was like Jonah was speaking in some kind of code; it was stilted and confusing and Elliot didn’t understand anything except that Jonah hated him now.

And then Jonah had moved out of the Eggplant. And then he’d moved out of the  _country_ ; he’d made a last-minute arrangement to finish his final semester in some acting program in Italy, and just like that, he was gone. Elliot hadn’t even heard about it until he was already overseas.

They’d barely talked in the two and a half years since, while Jonah was off doing theatre residencies and artist programs—a few indifferent emails and Facebook comments here and there, but nothing else. Elliot had tried to leave a sincere compliment once or twice on Jonah’s posts about his adventures and successes, but it had always fallen flat and come across sounding stilted, or worse, sarcastic.

And now, here Jonah was, seeing him for the first time since that fall, and he was obviously assuming that Elliot was still using Nicholas without Nicholas’s consent, still pushing him into Elliot’s harebrained shenanigans without any due consideration for Nicholas’s time or Nicholas’s energy.

Elliot wanted to protest that it wasn’t  _like_ that, that he and Nicholas weren’t like that; he and Nicholas were a well-oiled hijinks machine, they were supposed to do everything together, and that was how it had always been, and of  _course_ Nicholas would want to do the podcast, because that was  _what they did_.

But Jonah clearly just thought the previous thirty months hadn’t changed Elliot at all.

Well. Whatever. He was wrong. Nicholas would make him see that even if Elliot couldn’t.

“Nicholas  _absolutely_ wants to act again,” Elliot said to Hazel, flinching away from Jonah. “Why, just the other day, Nicholas was saying to me that he thought the times we all spent onstage together were some of the happiest in his life. In fact, last week I caught him longingly staring at a call sheet for  _Fences_. What with his busy job working tirelessly to save lives, Nicholas has been pining for a chance to exercise his creative side. And don’t we all need that?”

A resounding silence followed this speech, and then right on cue, Nicholas and Kate walked in. “We need  _so_ much alcohol,” Kate said.

“We are finally,  _finally_ off the godforsaken T,” Nicholas said, squeezing in beside Elliot.

“Greetings, Denzel,” said Blake to Nicholas. Caroline flicked her parsley at him, possibly as a form of greeting.

“How much parsley do you have over there?” Elliot demanded.

“A lot,” said Caroline, looking unrepentant. “We had a lot of deviled eggs. Why? Is it ruining your aesthetic?”

Nicholas looked confused, but clearly decided not to ask. He hugged Jane and began, in that Nicholas-y way of his, to be vocally enthusiastic about Jane’s job. And when that was done he turned to Elliot. “How’s it going?” he asked. “Have you gotten yourself a starring role yet?”

“Almost,” said Elliot.

“We were just hearing all about how perfect you’d be,” said Hazel.

Nicholas looked surprised. “How perfect  _I’d_ be?”

“Yes, Elliot was just being very persuasive about how you ought to be considered for a role in the podcast.”

Nicholas looked at Elliot. “Was he?” he said dryly.

“You know, you should sit tight and let Hazel tell you all about it,” said Elliot, slapping him on the back. “I’ll fetch your drink. You, too, Kate.”

Nicholas sent him another look that said he fooled no one, but said, pleasantly enough, “So tell me about this podcast, then.”

Elliot couldn’t help it; he shot Jonah a look of triumph as he got up. He fetched Nicholas one of those Jambe-de-Bois beers he loved and then made it two because he had no idea what Kate might like and that seemed good enough.

“I’ll have a bottle of Veuve Cliquot,” said a voice over his shoulder, and Elliot closed his eyes for a moment. The bartender slid Elliot’s drinks over to him and Elliot turned around.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“It really doesn’t matter what I think,” said Jonah, without looking at him.

And—he had a point, Elliot realized. He barely knew what Jonah’s life was like these days, apart from what he read in all the increasingly glowy profiles and theatre reviews. Jonah had returned to Boston and was probably off having a life and probably dating a string of models when he wasn’t  _having drinks with Nicholas_. He had gotten as far away from the Eggplant as he could—he’d always talked about moving to the South End, and Elliot assumed that's where he was living now. It must have been working out well for him, living on the opposite side of the city from Elliot.

“But I  _know_ what you think,” Elliot said. “And you’re wrong.”

Jonah looked down at him, and his expression seemed to soften, and Elliot didn’t understand himself, why he was pressing this, why he wasn’t just walking away and telling Jonah to go fuck himself. But he barged ahead anyway.

“I didn’t plan any of this,” Elliot said. “It’s just that the podcast would honestly be  _better_ with a main character and a main pairing people could root for. You know that it would.”

“I also know that’s not the podcast Hazel wanted to make,” said Jonah.

“But she’ll see that I’m right,” Elliot insisted. “And you’ll see that I’m right. About Nicholas.”

Jonah said, “Elliot,” and then looked as if he were biting back what he really wanted to say. Elliot abruptly turned and ordered a third pink nitrotini.

“I’ve never doubted Nicholas’s talent at all,” Jonah said after a moment. “He’s an excellent actor. But that’s not the point and you know it.”

“Then what  _is_ the point?” Elliot asked, frustrated. “And why do you even care after more than two years of clearly not giving a shit?”

“I care because Hazel cares,” said Jonah. “And because Nicholas and I are still friends, no matter how much time has passed.”

 _You and Nicholas,_ Elliot thought.  _Not you and me_.

“And the point,” said Jonah, looking at him intently, “is that you’re still using him to get what you want, or hide from it.”

“It’s just a  _podcast_ , Jesus,” said Elliot, flushing beneath his confused indignation. “It’s not brain surgery. You could stand to lose the stick up your ass.”

“I—” Jonah visibly withdrew and took a step back from Elliot. The bartender cleared his throat and Elliot realized he’d been waiting for a few moments to hand Jonah his bottle of champagne and Elliot his cocktail. They awkwardly moved away from the bar.

“Sorry,” said Elliot. “I didn’t mean that. I know—I know I can get carried away. You’re not wrong about that.”

Jonah looked as though he felt this was a supreme understatement.

“But this isn’t like the play,” Elliot said. Jonah pressed his lips together, as though he were irritated with Elliot for even bringing it up. “It’s just a fun dumb podcast.”

“A fun dumb podcast that you have spent the last hour attempting to shape into your own personal romantic fantasy epic,” Jonah said.

“I wasn’t trying to—” Elliot started, but Jonah continued, cutting him off:

“You forget that I  _know_ you,” he said, and something in his voice made Elliot stop trying to defend himself. “Even if you were capable of leaving alone a project—any project—and  _not_ making it into an overwrought show that ultimately becomes all about  _you_ , you aren’t going to be able to do that in this case because this is Hazel’s creation, and Hazel is taking it seriously. Don’t fuck it up for her.”

Elliot bit his lip. “You always think that,” he blurted. “That I take over and fuck up everything.”

Jonah blinked. “That’s not what I think,” he said, more gently, and Elliot suddenly thought about Jonah’s filthy rich dad kicking him out when he was barely 16, not because he was gay but because he was  _too flaming_. Jonah’d had to do everything on his own; he was a grownup on a whole level of grown Elliot could barely fathom. Elliot and Elliot’s fuck-ups probably didn’t even register on the map of things Jonah gave a shit about at any given moment.

He probably didn’t think about Elliot at all.

But then Jonah said, “I think you could be completely unstoppable if you just got out of your own way,” and Elliot felt his stomach lurch, because if this was the sitcom of Elliot’s life this was the part where the live studio audience would gasp and ‘ooh’ dramatically.

Jonah seemed to remember where he was. “Here,” he said, collecting himself. “Why don’t you take this to Jane with my compliments.” He handed Elliot the bottle.

“You’re not staying?” Elliot knew he sounded plaintive, but it was just like Jonah to turn up after over two years and say something totally overwhelming and then duck out and leave Elliot having to make awkward excuses for him that no one else would believe because clearly they all thought Elliot was the one annoying Jonah into leaving, and nothing was fair.

“It’s a long commute across town,” said Jonah. “And I’m sure I’ll see Jane again before she leaves.” He dug out his wallet. “And if Nicholas does the podcast, I expect I’ll be seeing more of you as well,” he added.

“Wait,” said Elliot. “You’re going to do the podcast?”

Jonah shot him a look, and then he said, absurdly, “Plus c’est la même chose,” sounding rueful and self-mocking. He sent Elliot a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes before he turned away.

Elliot watched him close out his tab and leave, but he didn’t look back at Elliot before striding out into the night. Elliot thought, fuck it, and picked up another round of cocktails before he headed back to his seat. If people stared at him balancing the two beers, the two cocktails, and a giant bottle of champagne, well, such were the results of a run-in with Jonah.

He got back to the table just in time to hear Nicholas say he’d think about playing Sebastian.

****

The next few days were busy ones for Elliot. A tweet he’d written for one of his clients went lowkey viral and resulted in a bunch of obnoxious meetings in order to discuss the virality of the tweet as well as ‘next steps,’ which meant he had to put on a tie and look like he gave a shit in Zoom conferences. Jane, obviously, put Elliot in charge of her going away celebration, which meant he had to ask his dad to pull some strings to get them all into Pagu, which meant he had to ask his  _mom_ to ask his dad to pull some strings to get him into Pagu, which meant he had to tell his mom that Jane was leaving, which sent her into a sad speech about how that meant Jane and Elliot would never give her genetically perfect grandbabies, and another speech about how Elliot should really talk to his dad more, and Elliot was more than happy to leave that awkwardness alone.

And then there was Jane’s condo to pack up, and Elliot stealthily managed to get himself invited over to help Jane the same night Hazel and Hazel’s boyfriend were coming over to do a readthrough of the first podcast script with her—apparently newly revised after all Elliot’s suggestions. And once that was done it was easy enough to get Nicholas to volunteer to come help Jane pack, too, because Nicholas was a Good Friend, and if Nicholas and Hazel just happened to show up together, then so much the better.

Jane’s condo in Union Square wasn’t as big as Nicholas' apartment, but it was within walking distance of many of Elliot’s favorite coffee shops and restaurants and bars, not to mention Union Square Donuts, which was Elliot’s preferred hangover food on Sunday mornings.

Elliot was desperately going to miss complaining about the line for doughnuts with Jane, and how loud everyone around them found it necessary to be, and how Boston almost never had reasonable weather to be waiting in line at Union Square Donuts.

Jane, watching Elliot pack up all of her gorgeous Sendan Tokusa dishes, said, “Why do you act as if you’re never going to complain again once I go to California? You are going to be doing plenty of complaining. I guarantee it. You’ll call me just to complain. Complaining is part of your essence.”

“I can’t believe I think I’m going to miss you,” Elliot said. “Never mind, I’m definitely not going to miss you.”

“Also, you’ll definitely go to Union Square Donuts again.”

Elliot made a face that he hoped said,  _Don’t be ridiculous, my life will be devoid of all Union Square Donuts without you_. “Nicholas is way over on the other side of the city. See these dishes?” Elliot held one up. “I’m going to miss these dishes. Promise me you will never get rid of these dishes without offering them to me first.”

“How much wine have you had?” said Jane. “You can have no more, it all belongs to me.” She lounged back on her white mid-century couch and lit a cigarette.

Elliot said, “Are you going to help me pack at all?”

“No,” responded Jane, gracefully unconcerned. “I’m just going to watch you do it.” She blew a few smoke rings up to the ceiling.

“Really?” said Elliot. “I’m planning your going-away party, I would remind you.”

“And I would remind you that I covered for you that time you thought it was a good idea to list the Eggplant on Airbnb without telling Nicholas or Jonah.”

Elliot sighed. “That  _was_ a good idea. It just failed in execution.”

“So often where good ideas go awry.”

“Hey, I’ve gotten better at that,” Elliot protested. “I am  _much_ better at executing my schemes these days.”

“If you do say so yourself,” said Jane, sounding amused.

“And I do. I never miss the opportunity to say so myself.”

Jane smiled at him and blew a smoke ring in his direction and said, “Those were the days when you were a little baby hipster schemer. Look how you’ve grown. You definitely wear your hair better.”

“Shut up,” said Elliot good-naturedly.

“Remember when you were going to grow a mustache? You thought you’d be able to dramatically twirl it?”

“I’m going to throw one of these plates at you,” said Elliot.

Jane laughed and laughed on her beautiful white couch, being careful of her cigarette even in her giddiness, because that was Jane for you.

Elliot said reflectively, as he wrapped another dish, “I’m just really going to miss Union Square Donuts.”

Jane, semi-recovered from her mirth, puffed on her cigarette and looked up at the ceiling and said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

An hour later, Nicholas sat back and said, “No, seriously, I blame you for encouraging Jane to collect brandy snifters. Nobody needs this many brandy snifters.”

“Everybody needs this many brandy snifters,” Elliot said. “I worry for you that you don’t have this many brandy snifters.”

“We have, like, ten friends. When are any of us having a party that would require dozens of brandy snifters?”

“This is a failure of our parties, and I’m ashamed of it,” said Elliot, as the door to the apartment opened and Jane called out from the living room, where she’d been packing away bottles of Bordeaux while putting away a bottle of Bordeaux, “Elliot, grab the door!”

“Oh, who else is coming over?” asked Nicholas.

“No clue,” said Elliot, opening the door. “Oh,” he said. “Hazel. And Hazel’s boyfriend.” Elliot looked at Nicholas. “Have you met Hazel’s boyfriend?”

Nicholas gave him a weird look. “Tim, yeah, we’ve met.”

“Like,  _a lot_ of times, Elliot,” said Hazel, sounding extra-exasperated. Like, Hazel needed to learn how to not  _start out_ with an exasperation level dialed up to eleven.

“Okay,” Elliot said. “I was just checking.”

Jane said, entering the kitchen, wine glass poised perfectly between two fingers, “Nicholas, you are helping to pack and that makes you  _the best,_ ” and gave him a tipsy half-hug, since Nicholas was sitting on the floor.

Nicholas said, “Thank you. You’ve been busy.”

“I am also helping to pack,” Elliot pointed out.

Jane replied, “Guess why Hazel and Tim are here!”

Elliot had been expecting a reply along the lines of  _You are also the best, Elliot_ , so he frowned at Jane and maybe responded a little sulkily. “They’re going to help pack, too?”

“No!” proclaimed Jane excitedly. She was really decently drunk, thought Elliot, who felt certain her level of enthusiasm for Hazel-related shenanigans would not be nearly as high otherwise. “They have a  _script_. An entire draft.”

“A script,” Elliot repeated innocently. “Of... ?”

Hazel turned to Jane, who half-tilted into her and gave her a hug. “You know,” Hazel said, hugging back with a reluctance that caused Elliot to narrow his eyes in her general vicinity, because Jane hugs weren’t something at which one looked askance even if they were doled out under intoxication. “Maybe we should come back later.”

“No!” said Jane in apparent horror. “No, your podcast!” She tugged Hazel over onto the white couch and sank down on it, pulling Hazel down next to her. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

Nicholas sat back and paused in mid-snifter packing. “Oh,” he said, looking at Elliot with a look that told Elliot clearly that his scheme had been found out. “You brought a script for the podcast,” he said. “You don’t say.”

“Yeah,” said Hazel, looking between Nicholas and Elliot and rubbing her forehead. “I mean, Tim wrote most of it after the conversation you had the other night at Deep Ellum — wait til you hear it, I think it’s brilliant and I think even you’ll like it, Elliot. And when we add in Jane’s production design and the sound editing I think it could be really special.”

“You’re so right,” said Nicholas, “and you probably came to talk to her about all of that, so I should probably go.” He stood up, and Elliot immediately took the opportunity to grab his arm and pull him onto Jane’s other pristine white couch, which was conveniently located as far away from the door as possible.

“Oh, no, we’re not in your  _way_ , are we,” Elliot said, beaming at Hazel.

“Oh,” said Hazel. “No, of course not...”

“In fact,” said Elliot, “wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to hear Nicholas read for you?”

At this, Hazel brightened. She looked at Nicholas, who dutifully had to smile back at her, which meant he couldn’t quite complete the quelling glare he was attempting to give to Elliot at that moment.

“Only if you want, Nicholas,” Hazel said. “Even if it’s just to help us out tonight. We’re not even sure yet about the characters—making this into a series is a big deal and we’re still working out what the connective tissue is.”

Elliot bit back his first response, which was that obviously Nicholas should be their connective tissue, regardless of whatever the plot actually was.

“Nicholas can read,” Jane said, “if Nicholas puts a towel down so he doesn’t get cat hair all over my couch.”

“Ian Purrtis,” Elliot said, grabbing at the nearest piece of fabric he could find, which happened to be a pashmina Jane used as a teapot wrap because she said she wouldn’t allow anything in her house called a “cozy.” “The cat’s name is Ian Purrtis, and his hair isn’t causing any problems at all—sit on this, Nicholas—”

“We can just—” Nicholas began, as Elliot basically shoved the pashmina under Nicholas.

Elliot pulled Nicholas back down and said hastily, to get the evening back on track, “I’m  _so_ excited to hear the storyline!” He fixed his blinding beaming smile on Hazel’s boyfriend, who had seated himself on the floor in the opposite corner of the room. “We can all read for you!”

“Oh my god,  _yes_ ,” said Jane. “Drunk podcast reading party, this is the best idea.”

 _Obviously_ , thought Elliot,  _I always have the best ideas_.

“Are you sure?” said Hazel. “Even if not everyone is drunk?”

“Oh my god,” said Jane. “Nicholas, unpack those brandy snifters right now.”

“Ha,” said Elliot. Nicholas looked excited, and Elliot congratulated himself on making him get back on the acting horse; he’d obviously been away far too long.

“This is going to be great!” said Hazel, and Elliot congratulated himself on single-handedly saving Hazel’s podcast.

And then Hazel added: “Wait, why don’t we see if Jonah’s around? He can read the Mysterious Man!” and Elliot congratulated himself on single-handedly fucking up his own life better than anyone else ever could.

****

Jonah showed up with a bottle of rosé and a handwave when Jane fussed at him for bringing her yet another bottle of wine. He hugged her and said cheerily, “Nonsense! There has to be alcohol for a drunk podcast reading. And I see I have some catching up to do.” He sent the room in general a wink that  _still_ somehow managed to miss Elliot completely, then went and sat by Nicholas with a smile, and Elliot had to remind himself to unclench before he accidentally smashed one of Jane’s brandy snifters.

Say what one might about Hazel’s boyfriend—not that there was usually much to say—he seemed to have taken Elliot’s suggestion about making Sebastian the hero of their story to heart. And actually, the worldbuilding he’d been so keen on was interesting, Elliot thought: the settlement of New Antarctica was stuck in floating isolation and mired in Orwellian authoritarianism. Sebastian had moved to Antarctica hoping to find a refuge from societal collapse throughout the rest of the world, but his books were considered as threatening there as they had been everywhere else.

Hazel’s boyfriend had given him an opening scene in which the bookstore—called The Falconry—was subjected to one of many police raids. So far the police had never been able to prove that Sebastian was part of the resistance, even though it was immediately clear to the listener that he was. He was good at keeping up the pretense of being a shy, obedient citizen who kept his head down, good at playing parts and manipulating the local authorities. Elliot liked Sebastian.

The initial idea for Sebastian and the Mysterious Man to salvage one document was now a plan to have them retrieve eight documents that the Mysterious Man claimed had been lost to history when the federated Antarctic states were established. It was the Mysterious Man’s goal to retrieve them from the lost annals of time, bring them to Sebastian and his bookstore, and help Sebastian use them to bring change to the land. Hazel’s boyfriend had also kept Elliot’s idea about having the bookstore be a dimensional portal. And instead of the original idea to have the authoritarian regime overthrown by the end of the episode, now the story was going to stretch over an entire season, maybe more.

Nicholas brought Sebastian to beleaguered, world-weary life; he was the perfect mix of snark and cynicism and deep-rooted hope. The more he read, the more transfixed everyone grew, even without the benefit of Jane’s liquor cabinet.

And then the Mysterious Man showed up, with his dash and verve and seductive layers of mystery. Sebastian was obviously a trickster in geek’s clothing, a whirligig who was obviously more than he seemed; but it was clear as voiced by Jonah that the Mysterious Man saw right through him and had some tricks of his own.

Elliot had long thought that had it not been for Nicholas' anxiety and stage fright, which often made him struggle to remember his lines, he could have been a professional alongside Jonah and Blake. With a scripted podcast, he wouldn’t have to remember his lines for a live audience—he’d just have to be believable. And he was. Sebastian’s vulnerability and downtrodden exhaustion came through in the tired edges of his voice. When he first began his tentative flirtation with the Mysterious Man, there was deep cynicism in every line delivery, gradually imbued with more and more hope as they ran through whatever time-travel adventures Hazel’s boyfriend had written.

And Jonah was—well, they already all knew Jonah could act.

“Hey,” Nicholas was saying, his voice naturally sinking a notch into what Elliot had already come to think of as Sebastian’s cynical baritone. “We just closed for the night but if you’re looking for something specific—”

“Oh, I am,” said Jonah, looking up from the script and giving Nicholas a full-body once-over that Nicholas, of course, didn’t even notice. “You’re Sebastian?”

“Yeah. Probably not the only one in this town.”

“But you’re the owner of the Falconry. I guess that makes you the Falconer.”

“What? No, I just—the name’s just from some old poem.”

“You know that old movie?” Jonah shifted in his seat, still looking at Nicholas, and Nicholas looked up and caught his gaze, then, and suddenly Elliot could see it, see Sebastian, tired and bleary-eyed and completely unprepared for the gust of energy that had just swept into his bookshop, into his life, in the form of the Mysterious Man. “The one that goes, ‘come with me if you wanna live?’”

It was Nicholas' turn to sweep his eyes over Jonah, who would theoretically, as the Mysterious Man, be wearing some kind of patched-up getup. Probably had a top hat, Elliot thought. He seemed the type.

“You must not be from around here, Mister,” Nicholas—no, Sebastian—said in an exaggerated drawl. “They don’t play movies like that anymore.”

“You could say I’m passing through,” said the Mysterious Man. “I have a proposition for you, if you’re up for it.”

He looked at Sebastian pointedly, and they held each other’s gazes for a moment.

“Well?” said Sebastian. “Do I get to hear it or do I just get to stand here enjoying the view?”

The Mysterious Man looked down at his threadbare clothes. “Where we’re going, it helps to dress down,” he said dismissively.

“Where we’re going?”

“Have you ever heard of Spiritus Mundi?”

“I know it’s Latin. What, spirit of the world?”

“May be easier to show you what I mean. If we could just step into your office?”

“Anybody ever told you, you answer a lot of questions with questions?”

“Has anyone ever told  _you_ your bookstore is essentially a cosmic rest stop?”

“Okay,  _that_ response doesn’t make me want to step into my office with you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of responses that will. Shall we?”

“Are you always like this? With someone you just met?”

“I make exceptions when I’m on a bit of a—let’s say, a time crunch.”

“Well, Mr. Time Cruncher, if you’ve got a weapon hidden in that overcoat, I’m guessing you don’t pull it out for just anyone. You got a name?”

“Well. Not hidden in my overcoat.”

“Touché.”

“Why don’t you just call me... whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want?”

“Names don’t really matter to me. Much.”

“You know my name. Hardly seems fair.”

“The difference is that I’m about to trust you with something worth much more than your name.”

“Fine. For now, I’m gonna call you whatever comes to mind. Now why don’t you come show me why you think my bookshop is possessed or whatever?”

“Wait, wait,” said Elliot, because he felt uncomfortably close to clawing his way out of his own skin and he had to— _had to_ —take a break.

They all looked at him, a little disconcerted to have been jolted out of the scene—understandably, Elliot thought, but it couldn’t be helped.

“You’re not going to give the Mysterious Man a name?” he asked.

Hazel blinked. “Well, we thought it would be kind of fun to make the Mysterious Man have many names—kinda like the main character in  _Charade_.”

“Yes, but he’s Cary Grant,” said Elliot distractedly, trying to work through his own agitation. What was  _wrong_ with him? “You can get away with that when you’re Cary Grant.”

“You don’t think I’m as charming as Cary Grant?” asked Jonah with an exaggerated pout in his voice. Elliot got up for another refill of wine.

“I think Cary Grant wasn’t doing radio,” Elliot said. “You have more work to do. How are you going to get fans on board a ship if they can’t even make a portmanteau out of the name?”

“He’s got a point,” said Hazel’s boyfriend.

“No,” said Hazel. “No, he doesn’t. What does it matter if there’s a ship name or not?”

Elliot turned and stared at her.

“What does it  _matter_? Hazel, do you even know fandom?”

“Oh, please, I’m more of a fan than you are,” said Hazel. “But we’re not making a podcast for  _fandom_ , here, we’re telling a complex story—”

“And you want people to listen to it, so throw them some kind of bone and give the guy a name,” Elliot said.

Nicholas got up. “I think I want a refill, too,” he said, shooting Elliot a smile. “Maybe ix-nay on the backseat directing-ay,” he said when he came over.

“That’s not how you do Pig Latin,” Elliot muttered. “And I’m not backseat directing. I just...”

“You should listen to Elliot about this stuff, though,” Jane was saying. “He’s good at it. Don’t you have like 20,000 Tumblr followers?”

Hazel’s jaw fell open. “Twenty.... Thousand?”

Elliot shrugged. “That’s not many for Tumblr, though. And most of them are bots.”

“Aww, ickle Elliot, don’t be modest,” Jane said, coming over to him and giving him a hug. “Hazel, you should make Elliot your social media editor.” And this, this was why Jane was Elliot’s favorite. He couldn’t have planned it more beautifully.

“But that’s Elliot’s  _job_ ,” said Jonah smoothly, shooting Elliot a wary look. “What’s the axiom about mixing business with pleasure?” He was swirling his wine in the glass, and it wasn’t even half-empty, and that made sense because he’d been reading instead of drinking, and he’d gotten a late start, but it was still just like Jonah to be smugly less drunk than all the rest of them, and Elliot just wanted to, like, scowl at him, so he did.

“We don’t  _need_ a social media editor,” said Hazel.

Jane pouted. “But Elliot could market things for you. He’s good at that!”

“Yes,” said Elliot. “I am good at that.”

“Maybe let’s wait to see if you even have a podcast to market,” said Nicholas. “You don’t even have a cast yet.”

“Yes, we do,” said Hazel. “You’re going to be Sebastian, and Jonah’s just  _got_ to be the Mysterious Man.” She shot him a pleading look. “You know you want to, now that you’ve read for him.”

“Well,” said Jonah, and then he grinned, “I prefer to think of him as  _Mysterio_ ,” said Jonah. He rolled the “r” in “Mysterio” like he was in some fucking commedia dell’arte play.

“Oh my  _god_ ,” said Elliot. “Please tell me we’re not calling him Mysterio. I take it back, just leave him without a name, it’s fine.”

Jonah laughed like he thought Elliot had just said something hilarious. And Elliot  _was_ hilarious, but  _honestly_.

“Am I playing Sebastian?” said Nicholas.

“ _Yes_ ,” said everyone else in unison.

Jonah sent Nicholas one of his faint smiles. “I guess we’ll be soulmates,” he said, and Elliot barely avoided dumping Jonah’s stupid rosé all over Jane’s stupid white carpet.

****

“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this,” said Nicholas for the umpteenth time since the ride back to his place. “It’s just Jonah, he’s a professional, he’ll be fine.”

“He’ll be—he’ll be all  _Jonah_ -y,” Elliot spluttered, and did a handwavey thing that failed to encompass everything that was annoyingly Jonah-y about Jonah.

“Okay,” said Nicholas, going to his fridge and breaking out one of his craft beers. He offered one to Elliot as a perfunctory gesture, but even if Elliot had ever been interested in Nicholas' weird taste in artisanal breweries or whatever, he could tell Nicholas' heart wasn’t in it. “If you don’t want me to do the podcast, I won’t do the podcast.”

“Wait,” Elliot said, shaking his head at the beer. “What? Of course you should do the podcast. I didn’t mean—I’m just saying—”

“No, I probably shouldn’t do it. You’re right. So. No podcast. Thanks for scheming to get me to Jane’s in time for the reading, sorry your shenanigan is all for naught.”

“Okay,” said Elliot, confused about the direction this conversation had abruptly taken. “Are you angry about the podcast thing?” Elliot asked, because they might as well get it over with if they were going to have a fight about that.

“Do I seem angry about the podcast thing?” Nicholas asked calmly.

“No,” said Elliot, “you seem... I don’t know, about the podcast thing.”

“Because I’m surprised. Because  _you_ ’re the one obsessed with this podcast. I have no burning desire to be part of this podcast. I was going to do a bit part, if asked, and happily listen to it, and tweet about it, or whatever, and now you’ve suddenly got Hazel and Tim asking me if can commit to one rehearsal and one recording a week. Like, what?”

“Really?” said Elliot, maybe a little more hotly than he had intended, because maybe this had been simmering for a while. “Youhave no burning desire to be part of this podcast?”

“I… No, I have no burning desire to be part of this podcast,” Nicholas repeated, sounding befuddled.

“Because I couldn’t tell with you and Jonah practically in each other’s laps all evening,” Elliot snapped.

“What?” said Nicholas. “That was... that was just the reading.”

“Whatever,” said Elliot, changing his mind and taking one of Nicholas’s proffered beers anyway. If it turned out to be awful, well, that more or less matched his mood.

“Is this going to be a problem?” Nicholas said. “Me reading with Jonah?”

“No!” said Elliot, even though it clearly was a problem, a huge, huge problem. “And you  _should_ have a burning desire to be on the podcast. You were great. Your Sebastian was great.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that you think so, it’s nice of you, but that isn’t exactly the point,” said Nicholas.

“Not the point?” Elliot echoed. “How can it not be the point that you’d be  _so good_ at—”

“Elliot,  _you_ always think I’m going to be good at things. You cast me as fucking Hickey. Your head is a weird place.”

“You were nominated for an award for that,” Elliot pointed out hotly. “I was right to do that.”

“Fine, yes,” snapped Nicholas. “You’re always right, and that’s always the point.”

“You—” Elliot halted, and all the rough words Jonah had said to him that day two falls previous—about how he was manipulating Nicholas into a punishing rehearsal schedule and a challenging role he didn’t feel comfortable with all just to make Elliot happy—flooded over him. “Did—did you not want to play Hickey? Did you only do it because I made you?”

“What?” said Nicholas. “No. Where is this coming from?”

“You didn’t want to do that at first either,” Elliot pointed out. “You just wanted a small part but I pushed you into taking the bigger one.”

“And that worked out great,” said Nicholas patiently. “But that was then and this is now. I’m in  _med school_ , Elliot. I’m going to have a public-facing career that requires me to interact with every kind of person under the sun, and  _children_. What are parents going to think if they find out their kid’s pediatrician is starring in some... genre-defying queer podcast? Playing the  _lead_?”

Elliot considered. “Genre-defying is actually a really nice way to describe it,” he decided. Unlike whatever description Hazel had come up with, that one was actually... marketable. And fuck it, he was already trying to market the dumb podcast.

“That’s not the part the parents are going to freak out about. And don’t say ‘fuck them and their small-minded views,’ because this is the real world we’re living in now, Elliot, and if I actually want to help little kids, which I do, then I can only say ‘fuck them’ very, very politely and mainly in secret. So it was fun tonight, and Sebastian’s great, but this isn’t going to be a thing. I don’t think it  _can_ be a thing for me.”

Elliot sat heavily on Nicholas' couch and let Ian Purrtis ruin his outfit again with all of his copious cat hair and thought of Nicholas out there trying so hard to save the world and sighed, “Fuck them and their small-minded views, anyway.”

“Are you crashing here again?” Nicholas asked.

Which was a fair question, since Elliot had tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“No,” said Elliot. “I don’t think so. I really shouldn’t. I think I’m running out of clothes here.”

“Well, I have to go to bed,” Nicholas said. “So I suppose I’ll either see you in the morning or I won’t.”

“Yeah,” agreed Elliot, although with each passing minute it became less likely that Elliot was going to get up enough energy to leave Nicholas' Berkshires couch. “You shouldn’t have to…”

Nicholas paused on his way out of the living room, looked back at Elliot, waited for the rest of the sentence.

“You shouldn’t have to let other people dictate who you are.”

Nicholas smiled at him, a wry smile that looked completely out of place on Nicholas’ face. “It’s just a performance,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Elliot, “until you stop knowing what part of the performance is real.”

Nicholas said, “Well, that’s why I have you here to remind me,” and smiled and closed the door.

Elliot slumped sideways on the couch, letting Ian Purrtis curl up on his chest, and closed his eyes. Street noises drifted up to him, and drowsiness made him feel a bit dizzy, a bit tilted, and he fell asleep thinking about performances, and expectations, and why this podcast had so quickly turned into something he was dreading.

****

The next morning was a Wednesday, and Nicholas didn’t didn’t have school on Wednesday mornings, which meant that he was leaning against the counter, bright-eyed and far too alert, coffee wafting away, when Elliot woke up and padded into the kitchen.

“Made your favorite,” he said, watching in amusement as Elliot gulped it down.

“Thanks,” said Elliot. “Clearly I find tackling the philosophical tangle of making You and Not-You a podcast star very exhausting.”

Nicholas snorted. “I’m not going to become a podcast star, Mama Rose.”

Elliot lifted his eyebrows. “Mama Rose? That’s really what you decided to go with?”

The appalling thought occurred to him that Nicholas' sudden penchant for Sondheim might be the regrettable influence of all those drinks with Jonah; fortunately, Nicholas only laughed and looked mildly embarrassed. “First thing that came to mind. It’s still early in the day, remember?”

“The first thing that came to mind was to call me your  _mother_?  _”_ Elliot leaned over and pinched his cheek and Nicholas ducked away, squirming. “Freud would have a field day.”

“And now I’m going to go do some work before you tell me I’ve gotta get a gimmick,” said Nicholas.

Elliot took a long drink of his coffee and said grandly, “Everything’s coming up Elliot.”

Nicholas said, in an odd voice, “Trust me, I know.”

Once Nicholas was safely ensconced in Elliot’s office (which, on Wednesday mornings, temporarily turned into Nicholas' office), Elliot thumbed in a message to the group text.  _Jane’s going-away party. Friday. Dinner at Pagu, then make sure you have karaoke songs picked out and ready to go._

Caroline and Hazel and Jonah and Kate all wrote back basically simultaneously,  _KARAOKE_.

Nicholas wrote back,  _I’m working on Let Me Entertain You_.

Caroline said,  _Odd choice for you, but I will not complain,_ with a winky face.

Elliot said, “Ha,” out loud, and then texted Nicholas in his office,  _Ha_ , for good measure.

And then got a private text from Jane.  _PAGU?????_

Elliot smiled, because he knew Jane would like that, Jane had been wanting to try Pagu for ages. Multiple question marks were decidedly not in Jane’s aesthetic under normal circumstances. _Well, this might be your last chance_ , Elliot texted her.

 _Don’t be maudlin_ , Jane texted back.  _I’ll be back. But still. PAGU. Did you ask your father to get us into Pagu?_

 _No_ , replied Elliot,  _I slept with the maître d'hôtel._

_And it was good enough to get us reservations? Huh._

_It was just good enough_ , Elliot responded.  _I’m saving the really spectacular performance for your welcome home party._

And then he felt all verklempt, so he invaded Nicholas' workspace to check on the state of his closet. As he suspected, he was running dismally low on clothes. Ian Purrtis, who was ordinarily locked out of the closet because Elliot liked to try to keep his clothes cat-hair-free at least until he put them on, enjoyed the novelty of exploring the closet floor.

Elliot gathered up the pile of dirty clothes and nudged Ian Purrtis back out of the closet with the toe of his shoe. Ian Purrtis meowed his disagreement with this decision and stalked over to Nicholas, tail held aloft, as Elliot re-closed the closet door.

In the kitchen, Elliot stood with his still-mostly-full coffee mug and frowned at the pile of clothes he’d dropped on the counter. Nearly everything he owned would have to go to to the dry cleaner, because Elliot basically didn’t own casual clothes except for the requisite pair of skinny jeans and the gag t-shirts he and Jane occasionally bought each other that he wore semi-ironically. But everything else was formal, and staring at the pile of formal clothes that felt oddly out of place in Nicholas’ totally informal apartment, he thought:  _it’s just a performance_ , and then:  _oh_.

He practically skipped back to Nicholas' office, where he struck a jaunty cross-legged pose in the doorway.

“You might be onto something, Louise,” he said.

Nicholas looked up from his laptop, then said, “Oh, God.”

“I have the best idea,” said Elliot. “Like, really, the best idea. I’m a genius.”

“I cannot wait to hear,” said Nicholas. “The suspense is unbearable.”

“You should have a secret identity,” Elliot said eagerly.

Nicholas lifted his eyebrows and took a slow sip from his own coffee mug. “I should have a secret identity,” he echoed. “For what purpose? Just for fun?”

Elliot rolled his eyes. “No, for the podcast. You don’t want the people you have to work with to know you’re doing a podcast. Fine. Cool. I get it. So you could be you, and not you.”

There was a moment of silence, then Nicholas said, “A stage name? Are you suggesting I have a stage name? Is your great genius idea that you think you invented  _stage names_?”

“Well, when you put it that way,” said Elliot, indignant.

Nicholas sighed, one of those fond-exasperation sighs that genuinely seemed to follow Elliot around. He said, “What is up with you scheming this hard to make me into a podcast star? Why don’t  _you_ become a podcast star?”

“Because I’m no good at pretending to be anybody but myself,” Elliot said honestly.

“Yeah, but you’re so  _good_ at pretending to be yourself,” said Nicholas.

“You haven’t had a good shenanigan in a while. I think you need a good shenanigan,” said Elliot. He picked up Ian Purrtis. “What do you think, Ian Purrtis? Does Nicholas need a good shenanigan? Ian Purrtis says yes, you do.” Elliot turned Ian Purrtis in his arms to face Nicholas.

Nicholas automatically scritched Ian Purrtis under the chin and contemplated Elliot. “You’ve really put some thought into this,” he said.

“Look,” said Elliot, “we don’t even know how big this thing will be. They might lose steam or get distracted before they get more than another episode or two written. It might all come to nothing.  _But_ if it really is something, then using a secret identity would be perfect for you.”

“Huh,” said Nicholas. “If they go through with this, sure. I’ll think about it.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Elliot, and nodded obediently, and put Ian Purrtis back down on the floor, and tried not to grin too triumphantly at Nicholas as he said good-bye.

Because Nicholas had said  _if_ , and when it came to Nicholas saying  _if_ to him, Elliot knew that was basically a  _when_.

****

In Elliot’s head was an entire mental binder full of important information for making Jane’s going-away party a success, not just in wishing Jane  _bon voyage_ , but also in making Nicholas so entrenched as the star of Hazel’s podcast that it would be impossible to imagine the podcast without him.

A secondary part of this plan was to come up with some role for Jonah in the podcast that wasn’t  _the love of Nicholas' life_. Like, maybe Nicholas' tailor or shoe-shine person or...something. Surely Nicholas' character would need something like that, even in a dystopia. He could still be in every single episode, he just wouldn’t have the opportunity to be  _extra_ -Jonah-y in Nicholas' direction.

Tonight’s Pagu agenda was not to fuck up seeing Jane off; to continue not fucking up Nicholas' podcast stardom; and to fix the fuck-up of turning Nicholas and Jonah into an epic love story.

Of course, that was the agenda before he Elliot found himself sandwiched between Jane and Hazel’s boyfriend, with Nicholas across from him, flanked by Hazel and Jonah, who was wearing, honest to god, his favorite brocaded smoking jacket. Elliot wasn’t sure how this seating arrangement had happened, but it was the worst seating arrangement in the history of time.

Luckily Blake was sitting on Jonah’s other side and somehow had gotten Jonah engaged on the subject of The Proper Amount of Time to Devote to Rehearsal So As to Appear Polished But Not Scripted, a lecture which Jonah was delivering with fully scripted gusto, but Blake looked very interested, which was weird but welcome.

Nicholas looked over the gorgeous cocktail menu and said to the waiter, “Sorry, can I just have a mojito?” which was  _even worse_ than a craft beer, and then Nicholas fucking  _winked_ at him like he was adorable, which was clearly the opposite of true.

Then Hazel said, “Oooh, that sounds good, I’ll have a mojito, too,” because  _of course_. Elliot was quickly losing control of this entire evening.

It was Caroline who saved it, from where she was sitting on the other side of Jane, leaning forward and saying with her characteristic dramatic weight, “ _Nicholas_. I have been hearing all about your Sebastian and can I say: I am in love.”

Nicholas gave one of those quick bursts of laughter he always gave when startled by someone suggesting something good about him. In another person, Elliot thought—like, perhaps, a certain person sitting next to him who seemed to know exactly how charming he was at all moments—those little bursts of laughter would have been artifice and guile. But when it came to Nicholas, he was genuinely caught off-guard by nice things, no matter how true. He said, “Not really my Sebastian—”

“ _Yes_ ,” insisted Jane and Hazel simultaneously.

“Definitely your Sebastian,” Hazel said.

“I have endless texts from Hazel about how good your Sebastian was,” Caroline said. “And from Jane.”

“I didn’t text Caroline,” said Elliot, now irked at himself for not texting Caroline, “but I third the opinion. You were an excellent Sebastian.” Elliot gave Nicholas a meaningful look that said,  _See? It’s not just me who thinks you’re great_.

“Yes, he was,” said Jonah, unfortunately distracted out of his lecture to give Nicholas one of his very close, piercing, Ac-Tor looks. “Hazel was texting me about coming up with story ideas for our characters before she even left the condo. You inspired her.”

The waiter brought Jonah red wine, because of fucking course Jonah was drinking red wine, and Elliot spent a pleasant moment imagining it all over Jonah’s stupid stupid smoking jacket.

“What’s this?” asked Blake, leaning forward to get into the conversation. “Was there some kind of podcast reading?”

“It wasn’t…” said Nicholas. “It wasn’t really a reading. It wasn’t organized or anything. We were drunk.”

“No one was drunk,” Hazel said.

“I was drunk,” said Jane.

“But it really wasn’t anything organized,” Hazel said. “It was spur of the moment. I mean, we were all drunk and Elliot kept backseat-directing, which tells you how spur-of-the-moment it was.”

“I wasn’t backseat-directing,” Elliot protested, and he was about to be offended, except Hazel’s boyfriend chose that moment to say, “I think this drink is yours, isn’t it?” and there was Elliot’s Mount Tamalpais being handed to him, luckily just in time for Elliot to take an enormous gulp, and then another enormous gulp to make up for the shame when Nicholas was brought his mojito.

Jonah said, sounding amused, “Well, Elliot’s suggestions were mostly good ones. Except for all your excessively ridiculous names for the Mysterious Man.”

“They were  _not_ ridiculous,” Elliot said, pointing a finger at him.

Jonah grinned. “Malvolio,” he said. “Zorro.  _Yojimbo_.”

“All of them were better than Mysterio,” Elliot said. “Malvolio would have been amazing. Drunk Elliot had excellent renaming taste.”

“God forbid anyone doubt your taste,” Jonah said, and Elliot had to take another enormous gulp of his drink and then he had to order another drink and then Jonah turned back to Nicholas, somehow managing to angle himself so that Elliot was staring at his sharp profile, cut out. “So what did you think about Hazel’s suggestion that Sebastian doesn’t know what his own connection to the portal is?”

Nicholas looked at Jonah and then at Elliot glaring at Jonah and said, after taking a long swig of his mojito, “I thought it was great. But I’m still not sure I’m going to be reading Sebastian.”

“There’s no way you’re not taking the part,” said Caroline. “There’s no way we’re letting you miss out on becoming a big, swoony podcast star.”

“Not what’s going to happen,” said Nicholas.

“Well, I, for one, hope you say yes,” said Jonah, because he lived in a world where people started sentences with  _I, for one_. He sent Nicholas a smile. “I think we’ll have fun.”

“Right,” said Nicholas, “I mean, fine, yes, we would, but I’m not actually going to—”

“He’s going to have a stage name,” Elliot announced.

Nicholas gave him a very pointed look as he sipped his mojito. The look said,  _You are the reason I have to order mojitos._

“A  _nom de plume_!” exclaimed Caroline, with a very artful gasp. She held aloft her gorgeous, sparkling drink. It made a very pretty picture and Elliot spared an appreciative moment for Caroline’s unerring sense of aesthetic. “I  _love_ that.” Yes, Caroline had excellent taste.

“Who came up with that idea?” asked Jane, looking with steady, cool amusement at Elliot.

“It was collaborative,” said Elliot. “It was a collaborative thing.”

“Yeah,” said Nicholas. “The kind of collaboration where Elliot tried to give me a stage name and I said no.”

“That’s an Elliot kind of collaboration for you,” Jonah said. Elliot sent him a glare; Jonah toasted him with his wine glass.

Elliot said, “Thank you, Jonah,” pointedly.

“It wasn’t a compliment,” Jonah answered, and then took a long drink.

“Let’s name you Chauncey,” said Caroline. “Nicholas, you’d make a great Chauncey.”

“I think I made out with a Chauncey once,” said Jonah, sending her a grin..

“I would totally make out with a Chauncey,” said Caroline, winking at Nicholas.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Nicholas, flushing, “because Chauncey is  _fictional_.”

“Why does that matter?” demanded Caroline and Elliot at the same time. Caroline grinned at him and toasted him over Jane’s head.

Nicholas said, “There are moments when I don’t understand why the two of you ever broke up.”

Caroline snorted. “We broke up because Elliot is a black box of emotional morass.”

Elliot said, “Why don’t we not—hang on, are you taking notes?”

Because he’d abruptly noticed Hazel’s boyfriend was scribbling manically in a Moleskine.

“He’s a writer,” Hazel said. “He’s writing.”

“ _Now_?” said Elliot.

“So.” Jonah propped his elbow on the table and settled his cheek on his fist and said to Nicholas, “We should get together and talk about character interpretations and whatnot,” because he lived in a world where people ended sentences with ‘whatnot.’ “For our epic love story and all.”

“I wouldn’t get carried away, Casanova,” Elliot said. “I’d hardly call it  _epic_.” Jonah cut a glance over at him and then didn’t say anything, which was somehow worse than if he’d done the usual Jonah thing where he was snide and cryptic.

“No, I’d call it epic,” said Nicholas, completely unhelpfully. “Making it an epic love story was, in fact,  _your_ suggestion, from what I heard.”

“I’m a marketer, I know what sells,” Elliot said dryly. “Doesn’t mean you have to overdo it.”

“Hang on,” said Blake. “I want to know when the podcast auditions happened. I would like to audition for the podcast.”

The waiter said, “Are you ready to order?”

Elliot said, “Please, God, yes, let’s order.”

“Wait,” said Jonah. “I haven’t even looked at the menu yet.”

Elliot gave him a look that he hoped said,  _No kidding, because you were too busy ogling Nicholas weirdly_.

From Jonah's answering expression, the look was either extremely comprehensible or extremely  _in_ comprehensible. Meanwhile, Nicholas was frowning at him, but Elliot supposed Nicholas would have frowned at him like that either way.

And then Jane next to Elliot said, “Yeah, we haven’t even coordinated, Elliot, we have to make sure we order everything on the menu to maximize this experience.”

Elliot looked from Nicholas to Jane, who was also frowning but at her menu instead of at Elliot, and suddenly remembered that this wasn’t just another evening, that this was the  _last_ Jane evening, and Elliot had a lot of time in front of him to fix the snowballing Jonah problem but he didn’t have a lot of time in front of him to order complementary meals with Jane.

So he focused. He gave himself a mental pep talk in which he reminded himself of one of the Goals of Pagu (don’t fuck up seeing Jane off) and turned to Jane and said, “You’re right. What are you thinking?”

He debated with Jane the optimum combination of noodles, sashimi, and croquetas to order between them, and then Elliot vaguely recalled that Nicholas had suggested the cheese plate at some point.

“Did you still want to split the cheese plate?” he asked Nicholas.

“Oh,” said Nicholas. “Is it okay if Jonah shares, too?”

Elliot looked up from the menu and found Nicholas leaning over Jonah’s shoulder to share the menu. He bit back his first three responses to that question, all of which he deemed inappropriate for Jane’s going-away party.

Nicholas lifted his eyebrows at him. “Are you choking? You look like you’re not breathing.”

Jonah looked over at Elliot. “Elliot is undoubtedly thinking about how nice it is that the three of us are all together again, partaking of the same repast,” he said in that sardonic way of his. “No?”

Elliot said, sending him a smile through gritted teeth, “That’s exactly it. What a happy world this is, where we all get to share the same cheese plate.”

“Should we share a cheese plate, too?” said Hazel to her boyfriend.

“It’s a metaphor,” said Hazel’s boyfriend, because apparently that was how writers acted over ordering things at restaurants.

Caroline said, “I don’t want to be left out of the metaphorical cheese plate. Jane, should we split a cheese plate?”

“It’s not a metaphor,” Elliot said. “It is a literal plate of cheese.”

“I need a cigarette,” announced Jane, standing. “Order me a cheese plate, too. And the rest that we decided.” She tousled Elliot’s hair on her way past him.

“I’ll join you,” said Nicholas, standing with a last odd look at Elliot.

Sometimes Elliot thought that it had been a terrible life decision of his not to develop a smoking habit. Really, it had been a terrible life decision to get sick on a cigarette on junior high school and to have a lingering visceral reaction to them for apparently the rest of his life. But he couldn’t very well start smoking  _now_ , Jane would call it a scheme and Nicholas would get suspicious and fucking Jonah would still be in Pagu in his fucking smoking jacket even though he also didn’t smoke.

So Elliot focused on life decisions he could change. He said to Nicholas, “I’m ordering you a respectable drink while you’re gone.”

“Knock yourself out, Hemingway,” Nicholas told him.

***

When Elliot had chosen Pagu, when Elliot had planned out Pagu, he had not been thinking about the stupid podcast. He had been thinking about Jane, and how Jane had really wanted to try Pagu, and how Jane should leave the East Coast on an incredible high, loving everything about it.

Instead, as Jane left for her smoking break, everyone else seemed to devolve into mini-groups, and Elliot looked around him and saw Hazel and Hazel’s boyfriend looking over story notes, Blake asking Jonah more questions about podcast auditioning, and Caroline drawing artsy hearts in her planner around the words ‘Seb <3 MM’ using multiple colored pens.

He got up to take a restroom break and get some water. He needed to refocus everyone, because this night was about Jane, not the podcast, or Jonah wanting to eat Nicholas' cheese.

He was in line for the all-gender room when he saw Hazel and Jonah get up and go to the bar. He shifted closer.

“So how are you feeling about everything?” Jonah asked her after putting in their drink orders.

“Oh,” Hazel said, rolling her shoulders. “Fine. You know. I’m just trying to find my center, find the right actors to drive the plot.”

“Oh, sure,” said Jonah. “And you know that you’ll have found them when you have us all read together and see how well we vibe off each other.”

“Yeah?” Hazel beamed. “I love how you just get it, Jonah.”

And these were the conversations that Hazel and Jonah had that Elliot was somehow worried Nicholas would be charmed and enchanted by? Elliot suddenly felt like all of his worrying had been absolutely ridiculous. Of course Nicholas wasn’t going to become fixated on Jonah and his  _cheese_ and his  _vibes_.

Jonah leaned in a little and lowered his voice. Elliot shuffled back and then traded places with someone three people behind him in line so he could hear better.

“...not so sure what I think about that idea,” Jonah was saying.

Hazel looked torn. “I know you didn’t want Nicholas to do the podcast,” Hazel added, and Elliot went on alert. Huh.

“It’s not that,” said Jonah. “Nicholas is fantastic. I’m looking forward to it.”

“You just didn’t want...” said Hazel, and she trailed off and looked at Jonah expectantly. Elliot tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it.

“It was probably inevitable we’d be seeing more of each other, anyway,” Jonah said, sending her a soft smile. “Nicholas and I have been having drinks, you see.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Hazel.

“Oh, you will, eventually.”

“If you don’t want him to be involved,” she said, but Jonah waved her away.

“No, she’s right,” he said. “It’s a good idea, give him a creative outlet. I just don’t want you to get hurt. He can be... intensely single-minded and completely unaware of how he comes across.”

“The two of you were never,” Hazel said, and Jonah laughed, and it was one of his hollow, cold laughs. Elliot realized he’d been curling his palms into fists and forced himself to unclench.

“Not remotely,” Jonah said, curt and dismissive.

Elliot didn’t hear what Hazel said in response over the roaring in his ears as they collected their drinks and moved back to the table; he turned and fumbled his way back to his seat and sat there, trying to keep his mind as blank as possible.

Honestly, just... fuck Jonah. He’d barely spoken to Elliot since he’d gone away, and now just because Jane was leaving and the podcast was starting he was waltzing back in being his arrogant, condescending self, like he’d never left, like he thought he still knew Elliot, just the same as always. Like he hadn’t been off somewhere having a completely separate life and being all actor-y and having tons of sex and adventure without all of them, while Elliot was—while Elliot was still just the same as he ever was.

Elliot contemplated fleeing the scene. Probably he could just take off and send his apologies to Jane later and no one else would care and he could forget all about the podcast and Jonah and Nicholas and Jonah together—but no, he couldn’t do that to Jane on her last night in town. He was here for Jane to begin with, not because of the stupid podcast. That was what mattered. Elliot could put his own issues on hold for one night.   

Eventually Jane and Nicholas returned from their cigarette break, and Elliot said to her as she slid into her seat next to him, “I’m hoping you really love it here.”

“So far so good,” Jane told him, with a quick smile. “I can’t wait to try the cheese plate.”

“Can we talk about the time Blake tried to sculpt the Eiffel Tower out of cheese?” said Caroline.

“It was for a  _class_ ,” Blake said. “I didn’t just decide to try cheese sculpting.”

“You know,” said Jonah, “I think cheese sculpting is an ancient art.”

“How ancient is cheese?” mused Hazel.

“Cheese is pretty ancient,” said Jonah, and Elliot slumped down miserably in his seat and let the deluge of completely inane conversation swallow him up until, thank god, the waiter arrived with Nicholas’ new drink.

“It’s called a Flight to Narita,” Elliot told Nicholas helpfully.

“Of course it is,” said Nicholas, looking fondly resigned. And then the food arrived, and everything was incandescently good, even the cheese plates that Elliot had been prepared to despise on principle but actually were delicious. Jane amused him by writing up the Yelp review as they sat at the table eating, and Caroline leaned over to request that they change the word  _delectable_ to  _toothsome_ because it was sexier, and then they had a debate about which word was really sexier, and if a word that had the word  _tooth_ in it could ever be considered truly sexy, and Nicholas said something about good dental hygiene being sexy, and Caroline found some garnish to flick at him, which somehow led to the two of them getting into a tickle fight under the table.

“So, when’s the karaoke?” asked Caroline, when she had, apparently, emerged as the tickle victor. “I was promised karaoke.”

“Yes. Karaoke,” Elliot agreed. “But first I kind of feel like I should say a few words.” He actually hadn’t planned that, but it just seemed suddenly weird to wrap dinner up without toasting Jane.

“A few words?” echoed Nicholas.

“It’s not a wedding,” said Caroline.

“Whose words?” asked Jonah warily, as if Elliot wasn’t capable of coming up with his own words.

Which solidified in Elliot’s head that he was definitely doing this. “We should have a toast,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I think it would be bad luck to leave without a toast.”

“A toast to what?” asked Caroline.

“To  _Jane_ ,” said Elliot. “To…” Now he wished he had thought about this before he’d opened his mouth.

Jane gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Sometimes, Elliot thought, the essence of his friendship with Jane was that he did things in a determined bid to wipe that all-knowing look off her face. And sometimes he succeeded. Like at this very moment, when he said firmly, “Google is incredibly lucky to have you, and we will miss you every second, but you’re going to be tremendously successful and develop this whole California aesthetic and take up surfing and start eating only green foods and in general you’re basically going to conquer the world and we’ll all get to say we knew you when, and all I ask is that you never lower your standards and continue to demand genuine egg whites in all of your gin fizzes.”

Jane no longer looked all-knowing. Jane looked almost tremulous. She looked a level of fond he wasn’t used to seeing so openly on anybody’s face but Nicholas' and it gave him momentary pause. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so successful in surprising Jane before.

She said, “Aww, Elliot. I promise.”

“To Jane,” said Elliot, raising his glass a little higher.

“To Jane,” they chorused around the table, and Jane smiled.

So far, Elliot thought, not fucking up Jane’s send-off was going pretty well.

****

Not fucking up Jane’s send-off was going horribly.

Elliot had thought karaoke at the Hong Kong would balance the Pagu part of the evening. They would do something extravagant and grown-up like eat at one of the city’s It restaurants, and then they would do a college throwback and drink scorpion bowls and sing horrible pop music that they all denied was anywhere near any of their Spotify playlists. It was a gorgeously balanced night out, if he did say so himself.

Except he’d failed to organize actually  _getting_ to the Hong Kong, because he’d stupidly assumed that was something his friends could all manage on their own without his direction. Yet somehow, while Elliot was discussing song choices with Jane, Nicholas and Jonah took off in a Lyft with Caroline. Elliot ended up in the same car as Jane and Blake.

It was fine, he thought. Even if Jonah was some kind of inexplicable, inexorable B-movie monster of sex appeal that apparently just kept coming for people until they succumbed, it was hardly likely he’d seduce Nicholas in a Lyft. Not even Jonah’s aesthetic was that terrible. Plus, Caroline would be there. Jonah probably knew better than to give Caroline that kind of blackmail material.

Blake said, “Please tell me you’re going to sing ‘Genie in a Bottle’ again.”

“Jeez,” said Elliot good-naturedly, “you do that drunkenly one time and everybody assumes you’re going to do it every time.”

“It was a life-changing event, Elliot,” Blake said solemnly.

“I am fairly sure there are patrons of the Hong Kong that night still talking about it,” added Jane.

“ _Life-changing_ ,” said Blake.

Jane said, “I hear that the owners of the Hong Kong now tell customers that if they drink seven scorpion bowls in a row, they might be able to hear the dulcet tones of your rendition of ‘Genie in a Bottle,’ if they listen really, really closely—”

“You guys are hilarious,” said Elliot, as his phone buzzed in his pocket and he fished it out.

 _Your car is slow. Already ordered scorpion bowls and put you down for Genie in a Bottle_.

“What does Nicholas say?” Jane asked.

“Nothing,” said Elliot, typing back,  _Better rub me the right way_ , before really thinking it through, and then deciding, fuck it, hitting send, and putting the phone back in his pocket.

The Hong Kong was typically crowded and loud and someone was singing “Sweet Caroline” badly off-key the way someone was  _always_ singing “Sweet Caroline” badly off-key at the Hong Kong and they found the rest of the group when Hazel whistled loudly at them, fingers stuck in her mouth. They were clustered together tightly because of how crowded it was, with an impressive number of scorpion bowls between them.

“Oh, good,” Elliot said, “so we’re set for drinks.”

“Set for drinks,” Nicholas confirmed, and slid a straw in Elliot’s direction. He looked safely un-debauched, but Elliot still looked around for Jonah in order to give him the once-over, too, just to make sure.

Except Jonah, somehow, had already flattered his way to the front of the karaoke line, because Jonah had never met a KJ he couldn’t bribe or a microphone he didn’t love or a Streisand cover he couldn’t ham his way through.

Elliot gawked. “How is he singing?” he asked to no one in particular. “How is he singing  _already_?”

“Now this is a bit of a change of pace,” said Jonah’s voice over the microphone, “but, it’s a classic, and a personal favorite, so—” he threw their table a significant look— “travel back in time with me for a moment.”

Hazel laughed out loud at the pun. Kate groaned. The music started up. “Fuck,” said Elliot. “Is he singing ‘Beyond the Sea’ like he’s fucking Frank Sinatra?”

“Bobby Darin,” said Caroline, looking rapt. The audience looked rapt, too. Onstage, Jonah stretched out his arm, pointed to a random audience member, and winked at her as if he were acknowledging a member of his fan club. The audience member shrieked.

And then Jonah, completely ignoring the prompter, started singing the  _original French lyrics_.

Hazel and Jane and Caroline all squealed. So did half the audience.

“Oh my  _god_ ,” said Elliot. Fuck. Of  _course_ Jonah’s French was perfect. Of course he’d just happened to have  _memorized whole songs in French_. Fucking actors.

“You are seriously weird about Jonah,” said Nicholas.

“I just,” said Elliot, continuing to gawk while Jonah crooned,  _La mer, des reflets changeants sous la pluie_. “I didn’t know we were reuniting the Rat Pack.” This was normally the point in karaoke when the mob started booing, but for some inexplicable reason people were  _cheering_.

“People seem to enjoy it,” Nicholas shrugged.

Elliot watched Jonah on stage. Offstage he still had that tall, stately look, but onstage it seemed to work for him in a way that Elliot had never quite figured out. He could turn on what Elliot thought of as Jonah’s, like, Super-Extroverted Performance Mode. Nicholas hadn’t needed to don some kind of persona to get parts. But even as good as Nicholas had been when he and Elliot had worked together in productions, he’d never gotten the kind of applause Jonah always seemed to get.

Jonah switched it on like it was nothing, and he got all the adoring throngs he could want.

Well. Elliot excepted, of course.

“You are extraordinarily drunk if you think I’m enjoying this,” he finally answered.

Afterwards Jonah had to wend his way through a throng of supporters, including a few who clearly slipped him their phone numbers. He returned to their table with a faint sheen of sweat glistening on his brow like he’d just been performing in Vegas.

Hazel clapped her hands. “Who next?”

“I know who’s next,” said Caroline, slinging her arm around Elliot.

“No,” said Elliot. “Oh, no. No one at this table is nearly drunk enough for that to be happening.”

“Must be one very hedonistic genie once you let it out of the bottle,” Jonah said, with one of those serious out-of-context glances at Elliot that Elliot always felt unnerved by.

“Elliot is a karaoke tease,” complained Caroline. “He’s  _always_ acting like we’re annoying for bringing up X-tina but he’s the one refusing to perform for Jane on her last night here.”

“That’s absolutely right,” said Jane. “I should be demanding you perform, for I am queen.”

“Why  _that_ song?” Elliot protested. “Out of all the songs in the karaoke pantheon—”

“Oh, please,” said Jane. “You always want to sing this song.”

“Elliot never wants to sing that song,” said Blake. “We always ask and he always says no.”

“Wrong,” said Jane. “False. Elliot always wants to sing this song. Elliot fucking loves this song. It is unapologetically frothy pop with a stone-cold emotional center, and it is therefore Elliot catnip.”

“Hey,” said Elliot. Jane batted his nose.

“You love this song and you don’t want to love this song,” she said. “This song is the key to understanding the enigma that is Elliot.”

“You’re drunker than I thought,” said Elliot.

“So you should go sing ‘Genie in a Bottle’ for me,” Jane continued. “Did I mention that I am queen? I am queen.”

Elliot looked around at them. “Fine,” he said. “But I need at least a scorpion bowl to myself first.”

****

One scorpion bowl later, Elliot stood up from the table, impressively non-wobbly on his feet, if he said so himself, and held his wallet out to Nicholas. “Hang onto it for me,” Elliot said. “I wouldn’t want to lose it.”

“Lose it?” Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “How would you lose your wallet while singing karaoke?”

“Nicholas,” said Elliot, patting his cheek,“You may think that you have seen me sing ‘Genie in a Bottle.’ But you have not ever seen me  _sing_ ‘Genie in a Bottle.’”

Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “Do I need to put you on some kind of leash? Is this going to be one of  _those_ performances?”

“Save it for the audience,” said Elliot, tossing his head artfully. “They’ll need to be restrained when I’m through.”

Nicholas laughed. “Well,” he said, “in that case, show us what you got.” And then he shoved Elliot towards the KJ to bribe his way to the front of the queue.

Elliot had sung at the Hong Kong plenty of nights, through plenty of bleary alcoholic hazes, but tonight felt different. It was Jane’s last night at the Hong Kong; everyone would be watching. And Elliot was still turning Jonah’s words over in his mind, still trying to parse how it was that Jonah could saunter in and observe Elliot for two seconds and make  _pronouncements_ about Elliot like he knew him, still, after all this time.  

Well. This was one thing Jonah didn’t know about Elliot. Jonah had never seen Elliot sing X-tina.

The way Elliot felt about singing was kind of like the way X-tina’s titular genie felt about giving it away: you had to be in the right mood at the right time or else it was no dice. Usually, the right mood involved friends and fruity drinks and a flattering amount of pleas from the peanut gallery to perform.

Tonight, however, if Jonah’s performance had been anything to go by, the right mood was apparently ‘make everyone in the room want to fuck you,’ and Elliot, weirdly enough,  _felt_ fuckable, which was a thing that didn’t happen to him very often. Probably it was the combination of scorpion bowls plus all those Pagu drinks, because usually Elliot needed copious amounts of alcohol to let people touch him, let alone to enjoy it, let alone to  _sing_ in front of an  _audience_. But he suddenly felt different. He  _wanted_ to deliver some kind of mic drop for Jane’s final night, and maybe this was exactly how Jonah felt every time he got some groupie to want to suck him off over fucking  _karaoke_. Well. Tonight Elliot was going to command the groupies. Tonight he was going to make every straight man in the room incredibly squirmy. He was going to make actual genies all over the world flutter their wings in solidarity.

So Elliot channeled his best John-Cameron-Mitchell-morphing-into-Hedwig-morphing-into-Farrah-Fawcett, winked at a random hot guy in the audience, and sang.

Elliot could never remember singing at the Hong Kong when the crowd in front of him was so vivid, when he felt like he could sense every single eye that was resting on him. Elliot stood in the center of the stage and spent the song’s intro loosening his belt, grinning at the wolf whistles he got in response.

“I feel like I’ve been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights, waiting for someone to release me,” sang Elliot, and looked straight at another random hot guy in the front row, who looked a little bit stunned. “Licking your lips and blowing kisses my way, but that don’t mean I’m gonna give it away,” sang Elliot, running his hand over his own lips and down over his Adam’s apple. Next he slid his belt up over his chest and leaned over the stage to dangle it toward the crowd. “My body’s saying let’s go,” crooned Elliot into his microphone, as the guy in the front row reached toward the belt in confusion, and Elliot jerked it away with, “but my heart is saying no.”

“If you wanna be with me,” Elliot sang, turning his back on the audience, “baby, there’s a price to pay.” He draped his undone belt around his neck and then tilted his head back in order to slither it across his shoulders and around his throat. As it dropped to the floor, he marched runway-style towards the front of the stage and rubbed his fingers together like money for “gotta rub me the right way.”

The crowd went nuts. Elliot grinned. He glanced back at his table; Caroline’s jaw was open and Blake was holding up dollar bills and Nicholas had his arms folded, smiling, and Jane looked smug, and Hazel looked slightly uncomfortable, and Jonah just looked infuriatingly inscrutable. Elliot stretched his arm out, pointed, and sent him an exaggerated wink, just because he could.

One by one, the first three buttons of his outer shirt came undone, and Elliot stretched an arm up over his head and ground slowly against the air. And then, since he’d already gone that far, he unbuttoned his outer shirt the rest of the way, by degrees, as he worked his way through the second verse, moving his hands over his own body, turning himself on. He used the refrain to drop the shirt to the floor and then moved on to the J-pop tee he’d worn just for Jane. And because he knew “Genie in a Bottle” just that well, he timed the moment of slipping his t-shirt over his ribcage and onto the floor perfectly with his last, “Come on and let me out,” and the crowd went wild, and Elliot stood still for a moment, letting the Christina wash off him, before he bowed.

And then Elliot retrieved his various articles of clothing as artfully as possible, tipped the KJ, who said, “I think I’m supposed to be tipping you,” and beelined into the nearest bathroom to splash some cold water on his face and pull back on his t-shirt.

When he stepped back outside, the guy from the front row was standing by the door, clearly waiting for him.

Elliot’s stomach dropped. He was still on an adrenalin high, however, and he didn’t want to lose it, so he sent the guy a nod.

“You were pretty great back there,” said the guy, clearly tipsy.

“Thanks.”

“I’m Connor.”

“Right,” said Elliot, vaguely relieved that it was far too ‘90s TV drama-y a name to actually bother remembering. “Elliot.”

The guy stepped into Elliot’s space and put his hand on Elliot’s arm—obviously an invitation, not pushy, mostly just warm—but Elliot tensed anyway. He took a step back and hit the wall, and the guy moved in again. “Hey,” he said. “Think we could go somewhere and talk?” This time he slid his palm up over Elliot’s bicep and kept it there, thumb stroking his arm.

Elliot tried to relax. This was, after all, supposed to be the easy part. ‘90s drama dude was a little sloshed, sure, but he was hot, and this was  _what people did_ , and it was ludicrous that even years out of college Elliot had still never gotten used to it, never gotten good enough at flirting or hookups or letting himself be turned on instead of awkward and uncomfortable at the touch of a perfectly nice other human. He’d just been singing about wanting to let his inner genie out, for god’s sakes. And he  _did_ —it wasn’t as though he were ace, he’d had plenty of partners and it was usually halfway decent; it was just, just, this part was such a  _chore_.

He muttered something noncommittal and tried to make himself reciprocate the movement, touch a hand, a hip, anything. He couldn’t. It seemed to be enough encouragement for his karaoke groupie, though, because the guy leaned in and said, “Cool,” and then, “God, you’re gorgeous,” and then whisked a kiss over the side of Elliot’s neck. Elliot shuddered involuntarily and then tried his best after the fact to make it look like pleasure instead of revulsion. He probably looked like a complete prude, he thought, fighting a surge of panic, rigid and immobile and wooden. Any moment he would have to reciprocate, any moment the other guy would notice that he wasn’t—

“There you are.” Elliot opened his eyes. “You’re being summoned—Jane requires your immediate presence.”

Jonah was standing a few feet away, looking bored and supremely uninterested in the fact that some guy had his hand halfway up the front of Elliot’s shirt. Which meant, since this was Jonah, that he’d deliberately come to check on Elliot.

Elliot’s stomach plunged even further. So much for showing Jonah that he’d changed. Instead Jonah was popping in to rescue him from unwanted drunk makeouts like they were in college all over again—and Elliot was too grateful for the excuse to get away to even pretend to be annoyed.

“Oh?” he asked, dumbly, shifting away and removing the guy’s hand from beneath his shirt.

Jonah hummed. “Something about Gackt.” He sent Elliot’s drunk groupie a cool nod of acknowledgment, and Elliot mumbled something vaguely apologetic and fled to Jonah’s side.

“What the fuck, just say you’re with someone,” said ‘90s drama guy as Jonah put his hand on Elliot’s shoulder to shepherd him away. Elliot’s cheeks burned.

“Thanks,” he murmured. He felt Jonah’s palm briefly sweep a reassuring circle over his back before he pulled away, and it was such an unexpected, warm touch that Elliot almost halted mid-stride.

Instead he righted himself and looked awkwardly down at the floor, and after a moment Jonah said gently, “Well. He hardly seemed your type.”

“My type?” Elliot looked up. Jonah sent him a cautious smile—a real smile, not one of the sardonic ones that seemed to be the only kind he kept on reserve for Elliot these days.

“Aladdin, of course,” he said, and Elliot laughed out loud, and only afterwards remembered, as they resumed their seats, that Jonah had practically warned Hazel away from Elliot like he was a disaster waiting to happen.

***

Elliot was somehow embroiled in a debate with Hazel on the relative merits of The Smiths versus Neutral Milk Hotel, which, how this was even a conversation they were having, he didn’t know, although it probably had something to do with whatever fool had decided to sing “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” at karaoke, and these were, frankly, just the kind of conversations you happened to have at the Hong Kong. Hazel’s boyfriend was paying very close attention to the debate in a way that made Elliot vaguely uncomfortable for no reason he could really put his finger on. He just felt a little bit like every time he looked up, Hazel’s boyfriend was studying him thoughtfully. Maybe this was just how writers looked at people.

“I mean, you’re entitled to your opinion,” Hazel was saying, stirring her drink with her finger like a starlet in a pre-code nightclub scene, “and it’s not as if Morrissey isn’t popular! I just think when you compare his lyrics to Mangum you find such a tighter sense of structure and aesthetic value, while Morrissey is just kind of all over the place—”

“That’s because Mangum was writing his own music to fit his own lyrics,” Elliot was arguing, suddenly invested even though he privately agreed with Hazel and Nicholas was always the one going on about the genius of Moz. “The true mark of genius is when you can set poetry to your own compositions  _and_ Johnny fucking Marr’s. Come on, Hazel, you’re the musical geek, you know you can’t have  _Follies_ Sondheim without Jule Styne Sondheim.”

“Okay,  _I_ am not the musical geek, you’re just in denial—” Hazel began, at the same time Hazel’s boyfriend said, “I have to say I’m surprised you’re not on the pro-Mangum side of this debate given your more eclectic—”

—And then Jonah popped up from where he’d been engrossed in conversation with one of his fucking  _karaoke groupies_ , because god forbid Jonah not be the most clichéd version of himself at all times, just to say, “Don’t let Elliot fool you. He’s definitely on the Mangum side of the debate. He’s just pretending not to be because he doesn’t want to be on the same side of the debate as you, Hazel.”

“You don’t know that,” Elliot told him, and Jonah raised an eyebrow as if to say,  _Don’t I_?

And, well, it was true, Elliot fucking loved Neutral Milk Hotel—but Jonah didn’t have to actually  _call him on it_.

“Remember when you defended the Lippa  _Wild Party_ to me for over an hour?” Jonah said. “And I was  _so_ sure you had to be trolling me, because I could think of no scenario on earth where you of all people would prefer the Lippa over the La Chiusa, but no, you insisted. And then  _years_ later I move into the Eggplant and discovered you own every recording of the La Chiusa in existence.” He sounded fondly exasperated by the memory instead of purely annoyed, which had not been what Elliot had been going for at the time of that particular argument and just proved why Elliot should never get into arguments with Jonah to begin with.

“Elliot!” shrieked Hazel. “You don’t like the Lippa?”

“Oh my god,” said Elliot. “We are  _not_ having the  _Wild Party_ debate like it’s two thousand and fucking two. Next you’ll be telling me Benny wasn’t actually the villain. Update your fucking musical theatre debates, people,” and Jonah laughed like he just couldn’t help himself.   

“Hey.” Nicholas suddenly appeared. “Hey, Elliot. I have to talk to you.”

Elliot looked at him in surprise. “You’re drunk. How many scorpion bowls have you had?”

“I’m a little drunk,” Nicholas said, “and also I need to talk to you, this is very important.”

“Hey Nicholas,” said Hazel’s boyfriend. “How do you feel about The Smiths?”

“Second-greatest band of all time,” Nicholas said promptly.

“Ah,” said Hazel’s boyfriend, and he turned to a new page in his notebook and started scribbling furiously.

“‘How Soon Is Now,’ that’s the greatest song ever written,” Nicholas said, tapping on the notebook as if he expected Hazel’s boyfriend to write that detail down. “Or maybe ‘This Charming Man.’ Or ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ Fuck.”

“What really baffles me,” Jonah said to Elliot, “is why  _Marie Christine_ isn’t more beloved,” and Elliot found himself beaming before he could help it.

“Why, Jonah,” he said. “That is honestly the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Jonah said, “Your standards for civility are deplorable,” but he smiled as he said it, and Elliot wanted to ask him if he thought  _Marie Christine_ could have made it in the era of  _Natasha, Pierre_ or whether the staging was just too inherently flawed, but Nicholas kept grabbing at his hand.

Elliot said, “You, hold that thought,” to Jonah and turned to Nicholas, because who was he to deny Nicholas a very important conversation? “Hey, do you think maybe Hazel’s boyfriend is, like, attracted to me or something?”

“What?” said Nicholas.

“He’s always staring at me,” said Elliot. “Do you think he’s, like, trying to proposition me?”

Nicholas started laughing. Nicholas started laughing so hard he had to slump against the wall to keep himself upright.

“Okay,” Elliot said. “It’s not  _that_ funny. People have been known to find me attractive before.”

“You’re so ridiculous,” Nicholas said. “I don’t even know how I  _know_ you, sometimes, you’re so ridiculous.” But he said it affectionately, smiling at him warmly, so Elliot was okay with being ridiculous. “Hey,” he said conspiratorially. “Want to hear a secret?”

Elliot swallowed. “Yes?

“I was lying just now when I said that the Smiths were only the second-greatest band,” Nicholas said very seriously. But he said it directly to Elliot, like a confession, like it was important that Elliot specifically understand this. “They’re technically the greatest band, but I love Blur the most, so even though objectively their songs have more flaws and they don’t have the undeniable talent of Johnny Marr or all the queerness of Morrissey they’re the greatest  _to me.”_

Elliot stared at him. “You’re telling me this like I don’t already know this,” he said, mentally doing math about what proportion of each scorpion bowl had been consumed by Nicholas. “Did you want to tell me something else?”

“No,” Nicholas said earnestly. “I just thought it was important to make my feelings known to you. My feelings about Blur. And The Smiths. It’s not that I think The Smiths are overrated, they’re great, they’re fantastic. They’re just not the right band  _for me_.”

Elliot stared at Nicholas. “Seriously. When did this level of drunkenness happen?”

“I blame that drink you ordered for me at Pagu.”

“Yeah, this is because you only drink fake alcohol all the time.” Nicholas' eyes were just a little glassy, which made it even more dramatic when he rolled them at Elliot.

Jane appeared and wobbled over to them. “Elliot,” said Jane, and immediately threw an arm around his neck. “You wore my shirt.”

“Just for you,” Elliot said. Jane’s t-shirt was a black t-shirt that said BUMP OF CHICKEN on it. She’d gotten him that shirt years ago as a thank-you for always indulging her love of Asian pop, and he had taken one look at it and decided that he didn’t need to know what a bump of chicken was, it didn’t matter because the t-shirt was perfect and it was 100% his aesthetic and he was going to wear it for Jane always. Except now Jane was going away and maybe it would be the last time she got to see him wear his ridiculous BUMP OF CHICKEN shirt, and Elliot suddenly decided then and there that he was going to wear it even after she went away, proudly and unironically, even if it got him stares from people on the subway, because this was Jane’s shirt.

“You usually wear nice shirts,” she said, hugging his arm.

“Thank you.”

“Except for that orange pinstriped one you think is so coolly vintage.”

“It is cooly vintage.”

“It’s hideous,” said Jane, and then she seemed to realize Nicholas was standing there. “Nicholas!” She reached forward and took his hand. “Promise me you’re not going to let our boy here drag you off the rails with him into his shenanigans,” Jane said solemnly, clutching at Nicholas' hand.

“Absolutely,” said Nicholas indulgently. “Nothing except the podcast thing, since I guess that’s kind of maybe happening.”

“But you don’t know how much of a shenanigan the podcast may turn out to be,” Jane insisted. “Especially now that you’re on board. Before it was, like, a low-level Elliot shenanigan. Now it’s, like, a full-speed-ahead Elliot shenanigan. A shenelligan.”

“Okay,” said Elliot. “You are both very drunk. Enough of this now.”

Nicholas grinned and leaned forward and kissed Jane’s cheek. “I hope you have a blast at Google.”

“Mmm,” Jane agreed, and tousled his hair and tottered over to Caroline.

“As for you,” said Nicholas, turning to Elliot, and then suddenly crouching in front of him, a hand on each of Elliot’s knees.

Elliot blinked, startled, and consciously did  _not_ move his legs further apart to make room for Nicholas. He said, “Um. What’s going on?”

Nicholas smiled at him. He said, “You are, like, the world’s most annoying person about forty percent of the time.”

“Forty percent?” Elliot echoed.

“You drink all of my best coffee.”

“I buy you more,” Elliot said automatically, his eyes on the fact that Nicholas' hands were still resting on his knees.

“You can be impossible to reason with, and half the time I really have no idea what’s going on in that ever-whirring head of yours.”

“I…” Elliot tore his eyes off of the look of Nicholas' hands on his knees to look at Nicholas himself. The current song was loud in the background and somewhere lights were turning on and Nicholas seemed both right in front of him and incredibly far away.

Nicholas moved closer, and for one wild moment Elliot thought Nicholas was drunk enough to kiss him the way he had the night of the MCAT scores, and Elliot wondered what the fuck he was going to do if Nicholas kissed him, but then Nicholas didn’t kiss him, Nicholas ducked to the side and said into his ear, “But I know your secret.”

“My…” Nicholas leaned back again, and Elliot tried to put a coherent sentence together and wondered why every scorpion bowl he’d consumed that evening was hitting him all at once. “What?”

Nicholas smiled at him, looking relaxed and comfortable with his hands on Elliot’s knees, settled between Elliot’s legs, while Elliot felt a little bit like someone had just sliced the top of his head off.

Nicholas said, “You’re a good friend. You’re actually an excellent friend. Jane is right: Being one of Elliot’s favorites is a dazzling privilege. I mean, also frustrating madness, but I’ll take it. It’s worth it.”

Elliot stared at Nicholas. “Seriously,” he said sharply, “am I the only one of us who remembers how to drink a scorpion bowl?”

Nicholas laughed, the kind of soft laugh he usually reserved just for Elliot, and Elliot thought in rising panic,  _Not now, you don’t get to do that_ now.

“I am drunk,” said Nicholas. “But all of that is still true. This is a good going-away party. Well done, X-tina.”

Elliot somehow found enough air to force out a laugh. “Your collective obsession with me singing that song is overrated.”

“Yeah, but you’re a good singer,” Nicholas said. “That song. It suits you. It’s all about bottling things up.”

Elliot swallowed. "You think I bottle things up?"

Nicholas narrowed his eyes, and impossibly leaned even closer. “I’m not sure,” he said, voice dropping to a low murmur in Elliot’s ear. “I never know if that’s just how you are or if no one’s rubbed you the right way yet.”

Elliot bristled before he could stop himself.  Nicholas didn’t notice. He straightened, taking his hands off of Elliot’s knees, and Elliot was so busy staring at his newly revealed knees as if he’d never seen them before that he didn’t really register Nicholas saying, “Hey, Caroline, I think you’re up next.”

And Elliot suddenly, deeply resented Nicholas for doing this, for  _always doing this_ , for—for only ever hitting on Elliot while he was completely sloshed, like he was just another drunk-ass rando at one of these stupid fucking clubs and Elliot was just some random party pick-up, like they weren’t, weren’t, whatever the fuck they were.

What was next? Would Jonah have to come rescue Elliot from  _Nicholas_ of all people?

He laughed hollowly, and had never been more grateful for Caroline descending upon him with a jubilant “Elliot! Thank God I found you.”

“Why?” Elliot asked warily, because it was never a good thing when Caroline was looking for him at the Hong Kong, but also, thank  _fuck_ Caroline was looking for him.

“I put you down to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ with me,” she said.

“Caroline,” Elliot said. “No. Somebody already sang ‘Sweet Caroline’ tonight.”

“It doesn’t matter! The crowd loves it!”

“It’s such a fucking cliche,” said Elliot.

“It’s  _my song_ ,” Caroline pointed out. “It is a song  _about me_.”

“It isn’t literally,” Elliot said. “I’m just checking to make sure you know that.”

“If there was a song about Elliot, you would never let us stop listening to it. Nicholas, am I right about that?”

“She’s right about that,” Nicholas said unhelpfully. Elliot sent him a scowl which Nicholas seemed totally unfazed by, and Elliot knew instantly that Nicholas was going to do what he always did and pull a tidy curtain over this entire episode in the morning. Fuck, he was already doing it. Just... fuck.

“You’d make all of us change our ringtones to the Song About You,” Caroline was saying.

“Who am I in your head?” Elliot asked her.

“Honestly, Elliot, you're more of a fully formed person in my head than you are in your own.”

Elliot had drunk too many scorpion bowls to parse that.

The KJ announced Elliot and Caroline singing “Sweet Caroline,” and the crowd at the Hong Kong was predictably delighted to hear, for the ten thousandth time, “Sweet Caroline.”

“You already signed me up?” Elliot eyed her. Caroline looked at him innocently.

Next to Caroline, Nicholas was drinking more of his scorpion bowl.

Elliot said, “Fuck it, I’ll sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ with you.”

****

The deal Elliot had made with the Hong Kong was that he could break out Gackt for Jane only toward the end of the night, which Elliot thought was stupid, since clearly the Hong Kong had no idea how much Jane was going to kill the Gackt and have the entire remaining crowd clamoring for her to sing another song.

At any rate, when the KJ finally announced Jane’s song, she was much drunker than he had anticipated.

“So, we’ve had a special request for Jane to come up and sing some Gackt. Is there a Jane in the house?”

Jane turned to Elliot, her eyes widening. “Did you get Gackt for me?”

“You said you wanted Gackt,” Elliot said.

“ _Elliot_ ,” said Jane, and then went streaking toward the stage, screaming, “Me! I’m Jane! That’s me!”

Jane conferred with the emcee about songs and Jonah, who was somehow sitting next to Elliot at this point, turned to him and said, “How on earth did you convince the emcee to let you do Gackt?”

“Gackt claims to be a 700-year-old vampire, Jonah,” Elliot said. “The real question is, why aren’t we all singing Gackt all the time?”

“He seems a bit outré for your usual style,” Jonah said, wry as ever.

They’d been squished together between Jane and Hazel, and Jane going onstage should have given them more room, but Jonah was warm against him and Elliot was tired and tired of overthinking everything and fuck it, moving wasn’t worth it. He looked up at Jonah. “I’m not sure the guy wearing a smoking jacket and singing Bobby Darin should judge,” he said lightly.

Jonah looked back at him, his eyes strangely bright. “The difference is that you  _clearly_ would wear smoking jackets and sing Bobby Darin yourself if I hadn’t already cornered the market,” he said.

Elliot laughed, “Jesus Christ,  _what fucking market is this_ you’re talking about,” and Jonah laughed, too, and his laugh reached his eyes, and Elliot was abruptly annoyed that his scorpion bowl consumption kept making him forget that he’d wanted to avoid Jonah tonight because Jonah didn’t want him to do the podcast and Jonah was stealing Elliot’s best friend away from him and Jonah was the most obnoxiously Jonah-y person Elliot had ever met.

So instead of spending another moment analyzing Jonah’s eyes, Elliot looked over Jonah’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Your karaoke groupie’s looking for you.”

“His name’s Lewis,” said Jonah placidly. “I’ll be going home with him shortly.”

“Of course you will,” said Elliot, and there went all traces of laughter from Jonah’s expression. “How does it go again? Plus ça fucking change.”

“Yes,” Jonah said thinly. “It seems neither of us has changed to any degree. Excuse me.” And he got up, taking all his warmth with him abruptly, and went to find his hookup. Elliot watched him, watched the way he plastered on his shit-eating smile for strangers and slid his hand over Lewis’ arm in exactly the kind of touch he’d rescued Elliot from earlier. Elliot tore his eyes away. He didn’t understand Jonah at  _all_.

"What's the matter with everyone tonight," he muttered.

Onstage,  Jane started singing Gackt.

The thing about Jane was she probably could have been a pop star, Elliot thought. Like, Jane was just that type of person. Jane could have been anything she wanted to be. She wanted to be exactly who she was, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an inner pop star waiting to get out there. It didn’t matter that zero people in this crowd of Bostonians knew who Gackt was, or what the lyrics were to “Vanilla,” the song she was singing. All Jane had to do was bounce around the stage smiling her Jane smile and pretending the whole audience was in on it, and pretty soon they were. The whole crowd shouted “Encore!” when she was done, and so Jane launched into an encore, bouncing around the stage some more and basically winning over several dozen new Gackt fans who were probably Shazaming the songs right at that moment.

At the conclusion of the second song, Jane performed a dramatic bow to raucous applause and whistles.

And then Jane said into the microphone, “So this is my last night in Boston,” to a chorus of sad aww’s and boos. “I’m going to go work for Google,” she continued.

Jane was drunk, Elliot realized abruptly. Well, he’d known that, but he’d underestimated the level of drunkenness. Apparently it was public-confession level. Time to get Jane off the stage.

“And I just want to thank all of you for sending me off with some Gackt—Elliot,” Jane said brightly when he appeared on the stage.

“Hi,” he said softly, trying to nudge her off as unobtrusively as possible. “Why don’t we—”

“Everyone, this is Elliot,” Jane told the crowd. “Everyone say ‘Hi, Elliot.’”

“Hi, Elliot!” the crowd called to him.

He gave them a little wave and said to Jane, “I think we should—”

“Elliot got me the Gackt tonight,” Jane told the crowd. “Like, that’s the kind of friend Elliot is. I said I wanted Gackt for my going-away party, and he got the fucking Hong Kong to play me Gackt. Can we have a round of applause for Elliot?”

They actually did give him a round of applause.

Elliot gave another little wave of acknowledgment so he wouldn’t look ungrateful and said to Jane, “Okay, but—”

“This is a thing about Elliot,” Jane went on. “Like, if you’re one of Elliot’s favorites, he’s…” Jane looked from the crowd to Elliot and said, “You’re kind of amazing, sometimes. I mean sometimes you’re an asshole, but sometimes you’re my best friend in the entire universe and who’s going to play me Gackt in California and I’m going to miss you desperately.” And then Jane hugged him, pressing her face into his neck.

“Okay,” Elliot said, and hugged her back, and closed his eyes. “It’s okay,” he promised. “It’ll be okay.”

Jane nodded against his neck and Elliot managed to whirl her off the stage and the Hong Kong crowd gave them one last cheer.

****

When the Hong Kong finally kicked them all out, they were all more or less too wobbly to walk, so Elliot very responsibly called a Lyft, and he very responsibly took Jane back to his place, and he very responsibly gave her his bed, and he crawled onto his couch and stared up at his ceiling and tried very hard not to think about anything at all until he fell asleep.

He woke with a raging headache and Jane making coffee in his kitchen. He spent a moment with his face pressed into his couch cushions, contemplating whether he could make this entire day go away.

Then Jane said, “I know you’re awake.”

Elliot sighed and rolled himself off the couch and wandered into the kitchen, where Jane looked suspiciously chipper.

“I hate you,” Elliot said, collapsing against his counter.

“I used your shower,” Jane said, and surveyed him up and down. “You should also use your shower.”

“Thanks for the tip,” said Elliot.

“And then I went inside to your parents’ house to say goodbye to them and your mother made me a Bloody Mary, which is probably what you need.”

“I need to die,” said Elliot. “That’s probably what would make me feel better.”

Jane smiled at him, then said, “What’s this?” and pointed to the gift-wrapped narrow box Elliot had left on the kitchen counter.

“Well, it says ‘Jane’ on it,” Elliot pointed out, daring himself to pour a cup of coffee.

“Elliot,” she said. “You didn’t need to—”

“It’s so you don’t forget about us.”

“I’ll be back every few weeks. And we’ll be working on the podcast together.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “Right. The podcast.” His brain was still swirling from the previous night and he wasn’t sure he knew how to feel about the podcast right now.

“Ha,” said Jane, starting to unwrap her gift. “It’s too late to start pretending you’re only into the podcast ironically. And you need it. It’s a shenanigan for you. I don’t want you sitting here feeling sorry for yourself about not having shenanigans around you. I convinced Hazel she should ask you to do the social media. Build the brand on Twitter. Sell everyone on how amazing and awesome the podcast is. You’ll be good at it, because you’re good at selling people on things. You’re a salesman at heart.”

Elliot supposed he couldn’t argue with that. He also supposed there was no point telling her Hazel and Jonah both thought he was a liability, that Hazel was clearly only going to ask him to humor Jane. He watched as she pulled the top off the box and looked down at the white glass lilies inside.

“White flowers that will never die,” Elliot said. “You can put them in a vase in your new place.”

“They’re beautiful,” Jane told him. “Also, how the fuck am I carrying these on a plane?”

“Carefully,” Elliot said.

Jane shook her head a little and looked down at the glass flowers and then replaced the cover on the box and said slowly, “I should go.”

“You can stay,” Elliot said. “I can take you to the airport later.”

“No.” Jane shook her head. “I think I’d rather… Thank you. For everything.”

“Yeah,” Elliot said. “Of course.”

She hugged him again, and Elliot tried to remember the last time he’d gotten so many hugs from Jane.

“I’ll see you soon,” she said, and kissed his cheek, and then he walked her out and waited until her Uber showed up and then watched the Uber take her away and then he turned to go back to his apartment and encountered his mother watching him steadily.

He said, “Jane says I need a shower.”

“Maybe you also need pancakes,” his mother suggested lightly, which sounded like a good idea to him.

***

Elliot, pancaked and showered and somewhat less hungover than he had been, was back on his couch staring at his ceiling when Nicholas texted.

_Are you sitting around feeling sorry for yourself?_

Elliot looked at the text for a very long moment. He contemplated what to say. He settled for,  _No_.

Nicholas responded,  _Don’t. Come over. You can help me make pickles._

Elliot didn’t even ask why Nicholas was making pickles. He sighed up at the ceiling and decided he might as well go see Nicholas. Nicholas’s messenger bag still had Elliot’s shirt and the Gackt CD from last night anyway; he might as well retrieve it.

Nicholas was as chipper as Jane had been. Why couldn’t any of these people be properly hungover?

“How are you even out of bed right now?” Elliot demanded sourly, sitting at Nicholas' table and watching him literally slicing cucumbers because he really was literally making pickles. Ian Purrtis jumped up on Elliot’s lap to try to make up for all of his annoying hangover-less friends, which Elliot appreciated. “Do you know how drunk you were last night?”

“How drunk was I last night?” Nicholas asked obediently.

Elliot watched him for a moment, uncertain whether to bring it up or not. He said, “You told me that I’m a good friend.”

Nicholas laughed lightly. “Did I? You’re right, I  _was_ very drunk.”

Elliot sighed and let Ian Purrtis rub his forehead against his chin. He was confused and he was tired and maybe he didn’t have the energy for any of this at the moment, and especially not Nicholas conveniently forgetting how he’d groped his best friend the night before.

“Hey,” Nicholas said, sounding genuinely concerned, and Elliot opened his eyes to find him looking at him in confusion. “You okay?”

“I’m tired,” Elliot said honestly. “I didn’t sleep well.”

“Are you angry I never say it sober?” Nicholas asked with a little smile. “You’re a very good friend. How’s that?”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “Thanks.”

Nicholas lifted an eyebrow and sat opposite him at the table. “You are clearly fragile today. I’ll lay off the teasing.”

“I’m okay,” said Elliot. “I’m just—”

“Well, I have something to tell you that’ll cheer you up,” said Nicholas.

Elliot couldn’t imagine what that could be. “What?”

Nicholas took a deep breath and said, “The podcast. And the fake identity. I’m all in. So have at it, Professor Higgins.”

“The podcast,” Elliot said. “I feel like I actually went a few hours  _not_ thinking about the podcast.” He looked at Nicholas. “And this is something you really want to do,” he said. “You’re not doing it just because of me.”

Nicholas chuckled, clearly either oblivious to or choosing to ignore whatever foul mood was in Elliot’s head. “I just said it, didn’t I? I figured you can hook me up with an alias now and by the time I meet Hazel for rehearsals tomorrow I can give her the good news.”

“Hazel. Aha.” Elliot dug out his phone to see if he had any messages from her, and sure enough:

_Hey, Elliot! I was thinking about what we talked about the other night re: you doing social media for the podcast. Since you’re so excited about it we’d love to have you! No worries if not, just let me know!_

“Ha,” said Elliot, texting her back, generously,  _Hey! Thanks for coming out last night. Social media, you say? I’m already on it._

Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “There,” Elliot said, swiping his phone off. “I’m officially your master and commander when it comes to all things social media.”

“Huh,” said Nicholas. “I thought you were just interested in having  _me_ do the podcast.”

“I contain multitudes,” said Elliot, “and am going to see to it that your alter-ego has a full and dashingly mysterious life by noon.”

“Lead the way, Walt Whitman,” said Nicholas.

“Walt. Walt,” said Elliot, herding him into the office, where Elliot had left his laptop the day before.  “You could be a Walt. Or a Waldo.”

“Okay, you are not choosing the nicknames,” said Nicholas, dragging his other not-really-an-office-chair-over to the desk and settling into it so Elliot could have the one with lumbar support. Elliot slunk into it gratefully. Ian Purrtis followed them into the room and settled warily in the corner.

“Dude,” said Elliot. “It’s symbolic. They’ll seek you here, they’ll seek you there.”

“That’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, not  _Carmen Sandiego_ or  _Where’s Waldo_ ,” said Nicholas. “Where were you even in the ‘90s?”

Elliot shrugged and navigated to Facebook to look for a suitable profile picture for his forthcoming masterpiece. “It is also the Kinks, and I will beg you not to impugn my honor by implying that I was doing anything but playing Mario Kart like all the other young chaps.”

“You have  _never_ played Mario Kart.”

“But I  _could_ , because I am a quintessential millennial.”

“And you’re going to prove that by naming me something ridiculous like Chauncey or Waldo?”

“No,” said Elliot, “I am going to prove it by being a social media mastermind.”

****

Elliot kind of thought getting paid to do social media was beneath him. It was like getting paid to do laundry or comb your hair in the morning—something you were going to do anyway, so you might as well get to be really good at it, because being bad at it was a terrible way to ruin one’s aesthetic.

But Elliot _had_ gotten really good at it, and now Elliot got paid for it. When he wasn’t doing social media for companies, he had a secret Tumblr where he mostly posted artsy hipster landscapes and architectural reblogs and indie films, and another secret  _secret_ Tumblr where he mostly communed with  _Pretty Little Liars_ fandom, and a secret Instagram where 8,500 followers raved about his carefully angled photos of Ian Purrtis, and a public Twitter where he did Twitter things, and a private Twitter where he mostly stalked celebrities he would never admit to stalking publicly, and he’d made an entire website and social media account network to promote  _The Iceman Cometh_.

So really Hazel passing the torch of handling the social media to him just made sense, not only because Elliot was a professional, but because Elliot was a professional who knew where to go to find fans of queer science fiction podcasts.

He got some minor work things out of the way and then spent the rest of the afternoon guiding Nicholas through the making of his alter-ego, Waldo James.

“I knew you were going to choose that,” Elliot said, “because of your Blur name thing.”

“I don’t always name things after Blur.”

“You do always name things after Blur.”

“Ian Purrtis wasn’t named after Blur.”

“Ian Purrtis is named  _Ian Purrtis_ , so I don’t think you want to use him as an example of how great you are at naming things.”

Waldo James had gone to Emerson, because it made no sense for him to be from somewhere else given that so far, every other member of the podcast had gone to their school. Waldo, however, was a business student who was currently getting licensed to sell real estate. He was calculatedly boring, and all of the info that Elliot spent the afternoon strategically putting on the internet about him was designed to be as mundane and attract as little interest as possible. Waldo had a Letterboxd account where he liked boring action-adventure and superhero films. After Elliot yielded up his private Twitter and made it Waldo’s public Twitter, Waldo suddenly had a boring profile made years earlier in which he followed all the right boring celebrities on Twitter. Elliot donated his second ironic Spotify account and made it Waldo’s primary account where he suddenly had a two-year-long track record of liking shitty pop music.

“I would never have added Little Mix to a playlist,” Nicholas protested. “That is all you.”

“No,” Elliot said sternly. “That’s all  _Waldo_.”

Waldo James had no Facebook presence and only one photo as his Twitter profile, but Elliot did donate his third secret Tumblr where he would occasionally drunkenly reblog photos of men with high cheekbones, mainly because they reminded him of Jonah and annoyed him.

“Why are all these reblogs of Benedict Cumberbatch tagged ‘#no one is fooled by your Oscar Wilde thing’?” asked Nicholas. “Are you making Waldo some kind of visual performance artist?”

“Waldo is still finding his Tumblr aesthetic,” Elliot sniffed.

After Elliot was done giving Waldo James a life, he set out to give Hazel’s podcast a web presence. Within a couple of hours he’d given her a full website (details to be filled in later) and a suite of social media accounts. “Are you really going to have time to run all of those?” Nicholas asked over his shoulder. “And does Hazel’s podcast really need a Snapchat?”

“My good man, everyone needs Snapchat,” said Elliot. “That’s like suggesting someone doesn’t need Polyvore.”

Nicholas' doubts, Elliot knew, would quickly be quelled at their first official rehearsal later that night. Although Hazel initially greeted him warily (“Nicholas! You’re here! And... Elliot. Elliot, why are you here?”), she warmed up rapidly when he produced for her the day’s accomplishments. So far, things were going well.

Or at least they were until Jonah stepped in.

“You’ll need a Patreon, of course,” Elliot was explaining beatifically to Hazel, “but I figure that can wait until you’ve got a few episodes under your belt.”

“Wait, wait,” said Jonah, who’d been scrolling through Elliot’s handiwork on his phone—though thankfully not the Tumblr where Elliot kept all his annoying-Jonah-esque-cheekbones reblogs. “Does this mean we’re all going to have to call Nicholas Waldo from now on?”

Nicholas laughed and said, “Of course not,” just as Elliot replied, “Well, yeah, clearly.”

They blinked at one another.

“Obviously you can still call him Nicholas in real life,” said Elliot. “But the whole point is to give Nicholas an alias that can’t be traced back to his job, right? That means that for all intents and purposes you’re working with a colleague named Waldo James—or whatever alias Nicholas decides to go with. I ran with Waldo as a placeholder for now.”

Except for Hazel’s boyfriend, who was watching everyone else with his pen poised over his notebook, they all began talking at once, over Elliot’s objections.

“Wait, wait, I don’t want to be called Waldo if it’s gonna be this, like, big  _thing_ ,” said Nicholas. “I thought it was mostly just for fun, like for Twitter and whatever.”

“And I don’t see how a name like  _Waldo_ will draw less attention to Nicholas,” said Jonah dryly.

“It’s after  _Walden_ ,” Elliot explained in his best small-words-and-visual-aids voice, even though it had technically been after  _Where’s Waldo_. “You know how to read, don’t you, Jonah?”

“Have  _you_ ever read a non-pretentious book?” Jonah retorted. “Because nobody’s going to think of  _Walden_ and everybody’s going to think of  _Where’s Waldo_.”

Elliot huffed. Last night at the Hong Kong, they’d ended up on a good note for the first time in ages, he’d thought—or at least they had until Elliot had ruined it. Jonah had probably come straight to rehearsal from some kind of all-day marathon karaoke groupie shagging ritual. Probably the sensation of not hating Elliot for five seconds had been fucked right out of him.

“Nicholas likes Walden,” Elliot said defensively. “Nicholas likes Thoreau and Nicholas likes Transcendentalism.”

Jonah lifted an eyebrow. “But does Nicholas actually like this name you’ve saddled him with?”

“Okay,” Nicholas said. “Maybe we should put a pin in the Waldo discussion—”

“I think Waldo’s a cute name,” said Kate, who had apparently been cast in all the other roles that weren’t for Jonah and Nicholas.

“Cute?” echoed Elliot. “Am I the only one who’s taking Hazel’s podcast seriously?” Elliot went to Hazel and put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. “This is actually happening. You’re going to put this on iTunes. It’s going to get marketed. You’re going to do behind-the-scenes previews. Your leading actor can’t be Nicholas half the time and some other name the other half.” He sent Nicholas an encouraging smile. “You won’t have to be in the spotlight if you don’t want—just your fake name. That’s what it’s for.”

Hazel sighed and shrugged Elliot’s hand away from her. “Thanks, Elliot, for your help, but I think for now we just need to focus on recording and producing the story. We can only afford to rent the recording studio a few hours a month, so I think we need to focus on optimizing rehearsal time so we can maximize our time in front of the microphones.” She sent a smile Nicholas' way. “You know it doesn’t matter what name you pick, we’ll go with whatever makes you comfortable.”

“I’m pretty sure  _Waldo_ won’t make anyone comfortable,” said Jonah.

Hazel shot him a look. “With  _whatever_ ,” she repeated. “Just let us know what you decide.”

Nicholas nodded, with a last frown at Elliot. “Well, whatever it is, it won’t be Waldo,” he said. “We’ll think of something else.”

Jonah cut a look at Elliot. “I’m sure  _we_ will,” he said evenly.

Elliot suddenly felt a twinge of indecision; but, no, he was absolutely right about the need to commit to a promotion strategy early on. And Hazel seemed to see that.

“Right,” she said, looking around at her production team. “Should we start?”

****

While Hazel went over production notes, Elliot mostly jotted down social media ideas in his notebook and wondered why he’d bothered to come. It wasn’t as if he needed to hear a script he’d already mostly heard, and it’s not like they needed him to be there if he was just doing the promotional stuff.

They’d need an artist, of course, to design promotional artwork for each of the show’s episodes, which meant he’d need to get a list of all the episode titles from Hazel or Hazel’s boyfriend. If Hazel had seemed concerned about the direction Hazel’s boyfriend might have been taking the podcast during the conversation he’d overheard at Pagu, she didn’t seem to be now; she was nodding enthusiastically after every word. Elliot wondered if she’d thought of any, like, catch-phrases or hashtags to use. He could work on those next.

He’d gotten temporarily lost in listing out hashtags, and then in listing a number of Tumblr artist blogs he needed to check on for commissions to see if they would design the kind of steampunk-art-deco-Frank-Gehry-ish poster design he suddenly had in mind for  _Time Ravel_ when he became aware that the mood in the room had shifted, and that the script reading was finally happening.

Maybe it was the fact that they were more familiar with the script on the second readthrough, or the fact that this time no one was drunk, or the fact that Elliot was better prepared for what was coming so he was able to pay more attention, but the first official rehearsal between Nicholas and Jonah was... intense.

“What do you mean, you want me to come with you?” Sebastian was asking.

“What, don’t you want to get out a little?” the Mysterious Man rejoined. “I know you get used to the darkness down here in Antarctica, but I hadn’t thought you were one to settle for never seeing the sun.”

“Look, Icarus, it’s not like we’re going clubbing. You’re asking me to travel through  _time_ with you. You can’t just—just drop in like this and tell me my bookshop is a dimensional portal and whisk me away. It’s—it’s—what would happen to the shop while I’m away?”

“It’s called a ‘we’re closed’ sign. Besides, we can transport ourselves right back here when we’re done. You won’t have lost any time.”

“This is—this is—”

“It’s a great adventure, and you know it.”

“I...”

“You  _love_ adventure, Sebastian.” Jonah’s voice—the Mysterious Man’s voice—sank into a molten purr. “You have a whole bookshop full of adventure, yet you’re so bored and fed up with your life you practically ache to run away. But you’re already at the bottom of the world. Where else can you go? Obviously, the answer is nowhere. But the answer  _could_ be: anywhere. Anywhere into time, anywhere in the universe you want.”

“But only if I go with you.”

The Mysterious Man smirked at him. “Well, I certainly hope so,” he said. “If I’m going to try to steal from a horde of angry, freezing Antarctic revolutionaries in order to save the world, I should at least have some arm candy, don’t you think?”

“Can we just pause there,” Hazel interrupted, and Elliot watched Jonah and Nicholas visibly pull themselves from the scene and each other.  “I have a couple of notes—”

“You have a couple of  _notes_?” Elliot said, in disbelief. “You interrupted  _that_ , for some  _notes_?”

Hazel blinked at him and said, “Yes?”

Elliot ignored her because he had a more important question than whatever Hazel’s nonsensical notes on that annoyingly perfect scene might have been. He said to Hazel’s boyfriend, “Did you rewrite that?”

Hazel’s boyfriend looked startled at the question, and since Hazel’s boyfriend had never looked anything other than Omnipotent God Who Knew All Things, Elliot decided to be impressed with himself. “What?”

“That scene, did you rewrite it? I don’t remember it like that, what did you change about it?”

“I…” Hazel’s boyfriend looked bewildered by the question. “Not a lot. That scene is pretty much—”

“Can I see your script?” Elliot said to Nicholas, and then took it without waiting for Nicholas to respond.

“Okay,” said Nicholas belatedly. “Maybe we can save this for—”

The script was a fresh copy, and Elliot frowned, wishing Hazel’s boyfriend had thought to do a comparison version. He flipped through it quickly and then said, “This isn’t a redline.”

“Elliot,” said Hazel, sounding long-suffering, “what does any of this have to do with anything?”

Elliot scowled, because Elliot always scowled when he didn’t have an answer for something, and he didn’t know why Hazel couldn’t just  _see_ that it was important, because clearly that scene had changed an  _incredible_ amount since the first reading. He did not remember that level of...  _that_ , when he had read the script earlier.

“Redlines are important,” Elliot said finally, sulkily, aware that everyone was staring at him, including Jonah, which made Elliot want to fling the script at Jonah’s head. He tried to save himself by thinking about social media. “We should, like, give redlines to the fans. For the Patreon.”

“First we need to  _get_ fans,” Hazel said testily. “By letting me get through my directing notes.”

Elliot gave Nicholas back his script. Nicholas raised his eyebrows at him and Jonah was blinking at him, and Elliot needed air, Elliot needed some kind of—

“Maybe I could get us all some coffee,” he said, clambering awkwardly to his feet.

“Ooh, coffee,” said Kate, getting to her feet. “If you want, there’s a coffee shop on the corner, you could just—”

“No,” said Hazel. “Shouldn’t you be taking notes or pictures or something? Since you’re here for the  _social media_ and all?”

“No, I don’t—” Elliot said, and then halted, because there was a vast difference between Elliot thinking there wasn’t really any reason for him to be there and then admitting it out loud. “I mean. I’m running the social media, yes, but I—you can send me notes or maybe phone pics or something later—”

“But that’s why we picked  _you_ ,” Hazel said, obviously annoyed. “Because you know how to do the Instagram and the Snapchat and take the phone pics.

“Hazel,” said Jonah, and the tone of his voice just made everything worse. “We just started. No one’s going to do something potentially viral in the next ten minutes. It’s fine.”

“Elliot—” Nicholas started.

And the last person Elliot needed to hear from at the moment was  _Nicholas_ , so Elliot said, “No, really—” with no real idea what the rest of his sentence was going to be.

“Elliot should stay,” Hazel’s boyfriend said evenly.

There was a moment of silence. Elliot tried not to be offended by the fact that everyone was shocked by Hazel’s boyfriend wanting him to stay.

Hazel’s boyfriend continued while scribbling in his notebook. “Elliot should stay. He has valuable contributions.”

There was more shocked silence. Well, Jonah and Hazel and Kate looked shocked. Nicholas looked flummoxed. He lifted an eyebrow in Elliot’s direction and waited patiently for Elliot to say something.

Elliot said, sinking slowly back down into his chair, “I... guess I’ll stay.”

In the awkward moment of ensuing silence, Jonah stood and filled a water cup from the cooler in the corner, and then filled a second one and brought it to Elliot before he sat down again, and Elliot looked at it and not at Jonah.

Hazel took a deep breath and let it out slowly and Elliot wondered if that was the kind of thing you learned in SoulCycle or whatever ridiculous fitness cult Hazel belonged to these days. Then she said, “So if we could—”

And then Elliot said, because he couldn’t help it, he just  _couldn’t help it_ : “I think Sebastian is out of character.”

****

"You think Sebastian should be more eager to go with the Mysterious Man?” asked Hazel when Elliot had stammered out an explanation. They were all staring at him again. “Why?"

"I think Sebastian is a trickster,” said Elliot. “He's pulled the wool over the eyes of the entire Antarctic police force. Why is he so squeamish about going with the Mysterious Man?"

"The Mysterious Man is dangerous, he's mysterious, he shows up out of nowhere. Wouldn't you be suspicious?"

"Oh, please, Sebastian reads him instantly. They're practically eye-fucking within half a page of meeting each other. And the guy offers him a chance to travel back in time. He'd be leaping at it."

"Maybe the Mysterious Man's got it all wrong," said Nicholas. "Maybe Sebastian actually  _likes_ being there all cozy with his books. Maybe he's not looking for adventure.”

"If you're not looking for adventure, why would you go to  _Antarctica_?"

"Maybe a better answer is that Sebastian is torn," said Jonah. "He's torn between what he wants and what he thinks he might need. Maybe he doesn't  _want_ to want all that adventure. Or the Mysterious Man himself."

"Well, if that's the case, wouldn't he be eager for the Mysterious Man to show him what he's missing?” Elliot asked him. “And why he  _should_ want it?"

"Not if he was afraid of what the consequences might be,” said Jonah. “He's a wary kid, our Sebastian."

"I bet the Mysterious Man could get around that hang-up pretty easily if he tried," Elliot said.

"I imagine the Mysterious Man has better things to do," said Jonah, “than coddle Sebastian into self-knowledge.”

“But—then why else did he come?” Elliot asked, suddenly wondering if they were even talking about the podcast, and unsure what they  _were_ talking about if not the podcast. “He came just for Sebastian.”

“No,” said Jonah gently. “He came because he’s trying to save the world. Sebastian is just a convenient, pretty pit stop along the way.”

Elliot didn’t know what to say to that.

“Or at least,” Jonah added, “that’s almost certainly what he’s telling himself.”

He got to his feet while Elliot was still trying to process why he felt hollowed-out by this whole conversation. “Can we take a break?” he asked Hazel. “I think I need a break.”

“I actually need to go,” said Nicholas. “It’s kinda late and I can’t fuck up my sleep schedule anymore than the Hong Kong already did.”

“No!” said Hazel. “You can’t go, we haven’t even made it into the recording studio yet!”

“Sorry,” Nicholas said. “Med student.”

“Okay, well,” said Hazel, shooting a look at Elliot. “Maybe we can try again Tuesday without any  _interruptions_.”

Nicholas also shot a look at Elliot, and then, weirdly, at Jonah. “Yeah,” he said. “That’d be good.”

****

The next day was Sunday, and Sundays were always nice because Nicholas would usually wind up cooking Eggos and either burning them or failing to sufficiently toast them on one side, and it was always hilarious as only the sight of Nicholas staring woefully at a plate full of mediocre toaster waffles could be. Sometimes Elliot would take pity on him, and make him go out for brunch with whoever happened to be around, but today Elliot was feeling all social’d out from the week just past, so he was more than content to mock Nicholas while stealing most of his Eggos and making them accompanying bellinis and then live-commenting on Nicholas' Sunday edition of the  _Times_ , because of  _course_ Nicholas subscribed to the Sunday edition of the  _Times_.

Halfway through the Style section, however, Elliot felt Nicholas' gaze and looked up to find himself being scrutinized.

“Sooo,” said Nicholas. “Last night was... weird.”

Elliot sighed dramatically. “Hazel and Jonah are drama queens,” he said, and Nicholas actually barked out a laugh.

“Not Hazel and Jonah,” he said. “You. You derailed the entire rehearsal.”

“But for excellent reasons!” Elliot insisted.

“Not really,” said Nicholas. Elliot sulked. “I’m not sure you can go to any more readings,” Nicholas said seriously. “There’s no real reason for you to be there. It’s just an opportunity for you to get yourself into trouble.”

And Elliot may have been thinking exactly that during the reading—but he couldn’t decide which was worse, being there for all future readings and watching Nicholas and Jonah do their... their  _thing that they were doing_...  or not being there and being left to imagine all future readings. “Hazel’s boyfriend says I’m useful,” he tried.

“Yeah, I have no idea why  _Tim_ said that,” said Nicholas, eyes narrow on him.

“Wow, Nicholas, thank you, what a supportive best friend you are.”

Nicholas snorted. “You don’t need a supportive best friend right now. You need a  _less_ supportive best friend who says that you’re distracting at the readings.”

Elliot sighed.

“And it’s... a lot... already,” Nicholas continued hesitantly. “The readings. The whole thing. I still have med school every day. I can’t commit to a bunch of super late nights. It would help if you weren’t there being distracting.”

Elliot sighed again and picked Ian Purrtis up bodily, since Ian Purrtis wasn’t taking the invitational hint of his lap, and said, “Sorry. Fine. I didn’t mean to be distracting to you.”

“I know,” said Nicholas. “But you should apologize to Hazel.”

“Should I?” said Elliot, raising one eyebrow and then feeling the other one lift, too, of its own accord.

Nicholas laughed a little. “Yes, you were kind of a terrifying stage mother last night.”

“Look,” said Elliot, “We’ve already made several  _Gypsy_ references this week.”

“So let’s make this quick so we don’t wind up re-enacting ‘Rose’s Turn,’” said Nicholas. He held up Elliot’s phone, which he’d apparently already unlocked using Elliot’s stupid ridiculous password, and waggled it in Elliot’s face. “Sing out, Louise.”

Elliot accepted the phone dramatically, phoned Hazel dramatically, and then dramatically waited for her to answer. Nicholas just smiled through the entire display, and, see, that, right there, was the thing about Nicholas. No matter how completely justified a person was in one’s long-suffering interactions with other members of humanity, Nicholas would just smile beatifically at a person as though he thought  _they_ were the one being ridiculous. It defied all logic, really, what went on in Nicholas' brain.

Hazel answered with, “Elliot?” She sounded annoyed.

“Hazel!” Elliot said grandly, trying to make the smile come through in his voice even though it was more or less plastered onto his face like a rictus. “I was so hoping I’d catch you! How are you this morning?”

“Elliot,” said Hazel, “This really isn’t a good time, if you’ve—”

“I’m calling to apologize,” Elliot said hastily, rushed along by the clear impatience in her voice and the way Nicholas was squinting at him. “I know last night was a bit over-the-top and I’ve talked it over with Nicholas and I’ve decided that I really don’t  _need_ to be at the rehearsals with you. I can just get whatever information I need from Haz—from  _Tim_.” Elliot said his name with a triumphant flourish. He assumed Nicholas would be deeply impressed by this.

Nicholas didn’t look deeply impressed, but in fairness it was hard to look deeply impressed while eating a burnt Eggo.

Whatever Elliot had been expecting Hazel to do in reaction to his extremely benevolent and gracious speech, she didn’t do it. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. “You know,” she said at last. “It’s not that we aren’t glad you want to help, but—”

“I’ve already reworked Nicholas' social media,” Elliot lied, cutting her off because he had the horrifying sensation she was about to do something unacceptable, like boot him from the project completely. Nicholas put down his burnt Eggo and raised his eyebrows. “Um,” said Elliot, grasping. “We’ve decided he’s going to be called, uh... Emerson.” Nicholas made a face. “Emerson James.”

“Huh,” said Hazel. “Emerson. He’s named after the college we all went to?”

“Right,” Elliot stammered. “It’s a little on the nose, but what can you do? That’s just Nicholas for you.” Nicholas silently mouthed a series of expletives in Elliot’s direction. Elliot waved them grandly aside.

“So that’s all taken care of,” said Elliot. He waited for her to sound impressed. When that didn’t happen, he added, “And of course we’ll have to talk about the Patreon at some point, and you’ll need someone to help with Apple Podcast distribution.”

“Right,” said Hazel. “And I’m grateful for your help with all of that, really. I just don’t want you to think that means—”

“Oh, and I was thinking,” he continued desperately, searching for something, anything, that would take the skepticism out of her voice. At once, it came to him in a flash, and he shot Nicholas a smirk. (Nicholas still did not look impressed.) “You said you only got the recording studio for a few hours a week, right?”

“Right...” said Hazel. “So?”

“So,” said Elliot. “I really meant what I said. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have done that to you last night. I wasn’t trying to railroad your scene or be some kind of backseat director. You’re doing a great job.”

“Well,” said Hazel, sounding slightly more mollified. “I appreciate that.”

“So let me make it up to you,” said Elliot. “Let me buy you all the time you need during the recording sessions. At least to get you started.”

Hazel gasped. “What? Elliot. No, I couldn’t—you don’t have to do that—”

“Oh, please, it’s just a few more hours for the first few sessions, right? It’s fine.” Nicholas’s eyebrows flew up.

“Just send the billing info to me,” he said, turning his back on Nicholas. “I’ll have it taken care of by the end of the day, and that way when you go into the studio you can take as long as you need to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

Oh, wow,” said Hazel. “That’s... Elliot, that’s huge. You know that’s huge, right?”

“Hey,” said Elliot, forcing the smirk off his face in order to sound bashful. “That’s what friends do.”

“Wow,” said Hazel again. “Do... do you want to come and listen to the recording? I mean we won’t have much for you to do, but—”

Elliot laughed. He tended to take for granted, sometimes, how easily a person could turn a situation to their favor, just by finding the right sort of leverage.

“Nah,” he said benevolently. “I’m good. Nicholas has assured me he’s in good hands. Or rather, that—” he paused for dramatic effect—“ _Emerson_ is.”

“Well... thanks,” said Hazel. “Really. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” said Elliot. Then he waited for Hazel to magnanimously  _insist_ that he should continue to come to  _all_ of the rehearsals and recording sessions.

Hazel did not do this, and Elliot realized nearly too late that their call had trailed off into an awkward silence.

“Well,” he said.

“Right,” said Hazel. “Hey, are you with Nicholas? Tim had a question about one of his lines.”

Elliot handed his phone back silently to Nicholas, and watched as Nicholas took it with questioning eyes.

He felt... he didn’t know what he felt. He didn’t feel bad about the recording studio. It was fine, whatever. He couldn’t even be miffed Hazel wasn’t grateful, because she was. It was just... she was obviously happy not having him come to the sessions.

And Elliot had said he was fine with it.

So. He’d be fine.

He slumped down in his chair and listened to Nicholas discuss the nuances of flirting with Jonah.

Clearly, this podcast was already turning on him. He would have to be diligent about wrestling it under his control.

  
  
  
  
  
  


A week went by, and Elliot very dutifully did  _not_ bombard Nicholas with questions about the recording session once they had it. He was pleased to note that Hazel sent him a short email thanking him again for letting them lease the studio for as long as they needed, and giving him a rundown on how it had gone, along with suggestions for the social media promotion.

Elliot very politely wrote back and thanked her while not bombarding her with questions, and then ignored all of her instructions about hashtags and promotion. He’d already seen a few results from his forays onto Twitter and Tumblr; a few curious onlookers who surprisingly didn’t seem to be bots had already followed the accounts. And some bots, obviously. Elliot allowed the most aesthetic bots to keep following them. It upped their numbers, and even some pornbots had decent aesthetics every once in a while. Nicholas hadn’t updated his Tumblr yet, but Elliot figured that could wait. He contemplated going in and reblogging a bunch of pictures of cute puppies just to push most of his own  _purely aesthetically driven_ reblogs out of sight, but nobly refrained.  

At last came the day of the podcast release, and Elliot, who had put off doing the research on Apple Podcast distribution because it looked boring, wound up having to cry off work for most of the afternoon as he dealt with a series of insufferable technical whatsits. Nicholas wandered in that evening and found Elliot still railing about the indignities of metatags and a thousand other impossible tiny steps for publishing the podcast.

“But you published it, right?” Nicholas asked.

Elliot waved a hand. “Oh, sure, hours ago. But I’m still annoyed.”

He had in fact sent out an email blast to all of the actors—Nicholas hadn’t seen it yet because something something med school—and linked the recording from all of the social media outlets.

Nicholas wandered into the kitchen, and Elliot heard him open the refrigerator, but then he came back out into the living room without any of the craft beer that Elliot had been expecting him to snag.

He said, aiming for casual and missing it by a mile, “And what are people saying?”

People weren’t saying much of anything yet, because it took a little time for people to get ahold of a brand new podcast. Elliot had sent a link to it to a couple of influencers to try to nudge the process along, but it couldn’t be instantaneous, not even on the Internet, because the episode still had to be  _listened_ to.

And Elliot wasn’t nervous because Elliot had nothing to be nervous about: the podcast either did well and his friends had a hit on their hands, or it didn’t do well and everything went back to normal and Nicholas stopped having to professionally flirt with Jonah. But Nicholas was clearly nervous, which was probably something Elliot should have anticipated. Nicholas had been nervous about the press directly after  _The Iceman Cometh_ , too. Then as now, Nicholas was starring in the show. Surely any comments about the podcast would be indictments on Nicholas' portrayal of Sebastian.

“Dinner?” said Nicholas abruptly. “Should we go out to dinner?”

Elliot had hours’ worth of work to theoretically catch up on and had assumed they’d order in so he could tunnel through it while Nicholas read one of his horrible geeky unaesthetic novels, but Elliot changed his mind because clearly Nicholas needed to get out of the house and stop thinking about the podcast.

“Yes,” said Elliot. “Let’s go out.”

***

Elliot knew Nicholas had probably had someplace super-casual in mind, but Elliot steered him toward the Townshend and ordered him a mojito and a plate of  mussels to split, and Nicholas, plied by his terrible drink and the quality seafood, complained about school. Elliot listened and wondered, as he sometimes did, why Nicholas hadn’t chosen a less grueling career with a less lofty and more attainable goal than life-saving. Elliot let Nicholas have the lion’s share of the mussels and ordered him another mojito and let him talk and considered the bad fortune that podcast release day had occurred on a day when Nicholas had already been keyed up because of other things.

“Do you want more mussels?” Elliot asked, when Nicholas mournfully replaced the last empty shell. “Or do you want dinner?”

“Has your phone been buzzing wildly?” Nicholas replied.

“Yes, but I’ve been ignoring it,” Elliot said. “You had important things to say.”

Nicholas smiled at him. “You have no idea what I just spent the last half-hour ranting to you about.”

Elliot shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. Do you want to look at our phones and see what all the texts are about? Or do you want to order dinner first?”

Nicholas considered, and considered, for so long that Elliot made the decision for him, since Nicholas was clearly going to dwell on it until he looked. “Look at your phone, Emerson James,” Elliot commanded, because sometimes, as Elliot had learned on  _The Iceman Cometh_ , Nicholas just needed to be firmly directed.

Nicholas looked at his phone. Elliot did not look at his. He sipped his daiquiri and told himself that he wasn’t nervous and watched Nicholas' face as he thumbed in his password.

Nicholas scrolled through the incoming texts, and Nicholas smiled at his phone.

Elliot ordered them a bottle of champagne.

“So,” he said, sitting back and soaking it all in. “What do they say?”

Nicholas was still scrolling. “Not much, really, none of them are talking, but the numbers are encouraging.”

“Huh?” said Elliot. Nicholas looked up. “Oh, you’re not looking? They’re mainly all Twitter notifications. From people following me. And the podcast, I guess.”

Elliot opened his phone and looked. Since the podcast had launched, 73 people had followed it on Twitter. He repeated this number in shock.

Nicholas beamed. “They like us!”

Elliot went to Tumblr and fumbled with the mobile app before giving up and going to the browser version, because why did he even bother with the mobile app (not that he was ever on Tumblr regularly enough for it to matter). The Time Ravel Tumblr had almost no followers compared to Twitter, but one lone follower...

“They reblogged us!” Elliot said.

“Well done,” said Nicholas, and then their champagne arrived and he toasted Elliot. “To your media savvy,” he said.

“To your consummate acting ability,” Elliot echoed, and they drank.

“Wedding toast?” said Nicholas after they were through.

“To us!” said Elliot, and they filled their glasses, linked arms, and toasted again.

At some point, Nicholas checked his own Tumblr and discovered that Emerson James already had more followers than the Time Ravel podcast. He even had asks in his inbox.

“Here’s an anonymous one,” Nicholas read. “‘Love your voice, can’t wait for the next episode.’ Here’s one that just says, ‘omg you and the Mysterious Man are so hot together just let me die.’” He looked up. “Interesting,” he said.

“Let me see that,” said Elliot, grabbing Nicholas' phone. He frowned at the ask. “No,” he said, and deleted it.

“Are you sabotaging my fandom?” Nicholas asked.

“No,” Elliot lied. “Finish your champagne.”

“Yes, dear,” said Nicholas, and did.

By the time they made it back to Nicholas' apartment, the number of followers had climbed. Elliot had figured out to check the hashtags to see if there was any buzz, and there was, a little. Feeling generous, he screenshot a few of the comments on Twitter and sent them to Hazel, who texted back shortly with a giant smile emoji and a thumbs up.

A few minutes after  _that_ , Jonah texted him with: _Thanks for promoting the podcast! Happy to see it’s already taking off._

“You were smirking at your phone and now you’re scowling,” said Nicholas, who was sitting next to him on the couch flipping back and forth between Bravo and HGTV like he was seriously contemplating whether  _Property Brothers_ could offer him better life advice than  _Say Yes to the Dress Atlanta_.

“I don’t get Jonah,” said Elliot. “Who even  _talks_ like he talks?”

Nicholas shrugged. “That’s just his style. He’s all, you know. Acty.”

“Acty isn’t a real word, Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare made up words all the time, so I fail to see your point.”

“Right, but Shakespeare wouldn’t waste his words on Jonah.”

“Jonah is, however, a Shakespearean actor, so I imagine our friend Will would at least cut him some slack.”

Elliot slumped against the couch. “Is he really, though? He’s not, like, doing residencies at the Globe with Nicholas Stewart and Idris Elba. He’s more like, downloading virtual reality tours of the Globe on his Oculus and wanking to it.”

Nicholas turned and gave him a look.

Elliot shrugged. “Or it could be the Old Vic. Maybe he just does them one after the other.”

“He’s working, though. He’s good at what he does and he likes it,” Nicholas said, yawning. “You should give him a break.”

“Urgh,” said Elliot. “Fine.”

 _Glad to help_ , he texted Jonah back. Then he reluctantly added,  _You should put it on your Twitter. Talk to the fans._

A few minutes later, Jonah wrote back:  _When I have fans, I promise I’ll talk to them all_.

Elliot scowled harder.

 _Why am I not surprised_ , he sent.

 _You’ve a very limited imagination if you think I’d be hitting on Hazel’s podcast listeners_ , Jonah sent back.

 _Just everyone else then_ , Elliot sent, and part of him wondered what on earth he was doing.  _Not everyone_ , he imagined Jonah texting back.  _Not you_. Or maybe:  _That could be arranged_ , and, ugh, even the Jonah in his head was insufferable.

 _I think I’ll just limit my social media flirting to Emerson_ , Jonah sent, and Elliot was wrong, the Jonah in his head had nothing on the real one.  _That should work well, don’t you think?_

“Hmm?” said Nicholas.

“What?” said Elliot, sounding a bit choked.

“You just let out a weird noise,” said Nicholas.

“It’s fine,” said Elliot, hitting the call button on Jonah’s text before he could think about it.

“I’m in rehearsal, Elliot, what is it,” said Jonah by way of greeting—not harsh but perfunctory.

Elliot, thrown, said, “I just, I just wanted you to know Emerson’s social media account is going to be run by me and Nicholas jointly,” he said.

“...Okay?” said Jonah.

“So,” said Elliot, “if you’re going to be flirting with Emerson you should just know it might not be Nicholas you’re talking to.”

Jonah laughed, and Elliot found himself annoyed that it was harder to hear what kind of Jonah-laugh it was over the phone.

“I wouldn’t be flirting with Nicholas,” said Jonah. “I’d be flirting with a fictional persona that doesn’t exist, which I believe was your idea all along.”

“Right, but people watching you won’t  _know_ that,” Elliot said, unsure where he was going with this. “They’re going to start shipping the two of you for real.”

“Why, Elliot,” said Jonah blandly. “Are you worried I can’t handle a little fanfiction among friends?”

“No,” said Elliot, though it came out weirdly uncertain.

“Are you worried  _Nicholas_ couldn’t handle it?”

“No!”

“Then what  _are_ you worried about?” This time Jonah definitely had his amused Elliot-mocking voice in place and Elliot had forgotten how much he’d definitely not missed that voice over the last two and a half years. “If it’s the flirting, that’s easy. It won’t actually mean anything.”

“I know that,” said Elliot. “I know it won’t.”

“In fact to anyone casually listening to this conversation, it might sound like I’m flirting with you, but we both know that’s not really the case, right?”

“What?” said Elliot. “I know you’re not flirting with me. I’m not flirting with you.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nicholas mute HGTV and not-so-subtly eavesdrop on him. He reddened.

“So you agree that it doesn’t matter what anyone might think they overhear because we both know the truth.”

“The truth that we’re not flirting with each other. Right.”

“So we’ve established that you’re not flirting with me and I’m not flirting with you. Anything else?”

“No,” said Elliot hotly. “What happened to your rehearsal?”

“I told them to take five minutes so I could not-flirt with you. There, does that make you happy?”

“Ecstatic,” said Elliot, and he disconnected.

“That was... a phone call,” said Nicholas.

“You’re all clear to flirt with Jonah on social media,” Elliot snapped.

Nicholas said, “Okay,” in a carefully neutral voice. “Thanks?” and Elliot flopped down dramatically on the couch cushions.

“Hey,” said Nicholas after another moment. “I haven’t heard the ep yet, not all the way through. You wanna listen with me?”

Elliot thought of having to listen to Jonah be all... Acty with Nicholas and knew that he’d ruin Nicholas' evening if he tried it. That wasn’t going to happen.

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just listen to it tomorrow, maybe use some parts of it for social.”

But the next day came and went, and then the next, and Elliot didn’t listen to the podcast.

Over the next week, he stayed true to his word: he  _had_ been glad to help, and this was all for Nicholas anyway, so he dutifully carved out a few hours a day to do the podcast promotion. While Nicholas went off to rehearsals and recordings with  _Jonah_ , Elliot spread the hashtags around on Twitter and Instagram.

He made a subreddit and invited some sci-fi and podcast fans to join. He went to the  _Night Vale_ tag on Tumblr and invited fans to check out the new podcast; he found some  _Doctor Who_ BNFs, not that Elliot would have ever admitted to knowing what a BNF was, and invited them to preview the second episode in exchange for some free publicity. He even contacted a few Tumblr fanartists and asked them to design posters for the current and upcoming eps. Hazel got super excited about that part. And that was nice, really. Early on it was clear that Elliot’s prediction about the show’s calling card being the relationship and Sebastian was spot-on. Fans were already starting to make fanart, and the fandom seemed to have already landed on a ship name: Mysterian. Elliot approved. He considered holding some kind of fanwork contest but decided to wait until things were a bit more underway.

What was less nice—what was, in fact, the worst—was that as the days passed and more people found the podcast, a distinct trend was emerging.

 _How cute are Sebastian and MM!_   _How do their actors get along IRL?_

_Can you talk about how you write Sebastian and MM’s relationship? Does it come from the script or are you influenced by how the actors interact?_

_I don’t know who I ship harder, Seb/MM or Ems/Jonah. Can we get pics of the two of them together???_

_Real talk: Jonah and Emerson are just as hot together as their fictional counterparts, right????_

_hai Jemerson OTP that is all_

And the thing was: Elliot had always been prepared for the fans, beautiful fledglings they were, to ship Sebastian and the MM—or rather, Mysterian. He hadn’t been prepared to be  _right_ when he told Jonah that they’d be shipping the two  _actors_ together. Even if they thought Nicholas was Emerson, there should have been some acknowledgment, surely, that the actors were just reading their lines, right?

But the fans tracked down Jonah’s Twitter and found Google Images of him from past productions and read between the lines of Emerson’s blog (which was, Elliot wanted to point out savagely, actually  _Elliot’s blog_ ) and came to the conclusion of  _Jemerson_.

Since he couldn’t exactly complain about any of this to Nicholas, he complained about it bitterly to Jane, who was unsympathetic. “You should be happy,” she said. “They’re excited! They’re just doing what fans do.”

When that did not work, he turned to Caroline, but this proved to be a bad idea because when he protested, “They think I’m Emerson! They want to ship  _me_ with Jonah!” Caroline just sipped scotch and said, “Do  _you_ want to ship you with Jonah?”

“Look,” said Elliot. “No one is getting shipped with Jonah. No one is getting shipped with anyone! This is reality! That’s creepy! Isn’t that creepy?”

“This would maybe be an objection if you hadn’t been shipping yourself with Tony Leung ever since I’ve known you,” Caroline said.

“That is  _private_ ,” Elliot said emphatically.

“It’s not private when I have  _watched_ you make one-night stand decisions based on what you thought was the likelihood they would gain you a lesser degree of separation from Tony Leung,” said Caroline. “Anyway, you’re not  _really_ upset because of the fans.”

“You’re right,” said Elliot. “I’m upset because the fans think Jonah is some kind of epic Byronian hero when mostly he’s just a dork in a costume smoking jacket who teaches high school theatre and calls himself a professional actor because he once did a commercial with Thandie Newton.”

“You used to like Jonah,” Caroline said. “You know, when you invited him to come  _live_ with you?”

“Is that your third scotch?” said Elliot. “I’m cutting you off.”

Caroline shrugged elegantly. “I’m just saying,” she said. “One day you’re going to figure out that it’s not that you hate Jonah, because you don’t hate Jonah.”

Elliot frowned. “Do you ever get the feeling people around you all know something you don’t and they’re not telling you?”

Caroline said, “The one thing we all agree on about you, Elliot, is that no one can tell you anything if you’re not ready to hear it,” and Elliot decided that Caroline was an unempathetic human.

And Elliot probably didn’t hate Jonah, but by the time rehearsal for the third episode rolled around, it was hard to distinguish what hating Jonah felt like from whatever the weird flare-up inside of him was whenever the fans sent him yet more messages about Jemerson.

He had been patiently waiting for enough time to elapse so that he could sit in on rehearsal without it being a big deal, so he was all politeness when Hazel finally said yes. But then she texted him to tell him that her apartment was having plumbing issues, so they’d moved rehearsal for the time being to the school where Jonah was currently guest-directing  _Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat_. Apparently even though he wasn’t technically on the faculty he still got access to the theatre wing after hours, so he’d invited them to rehearse there after his regular rehearsal for the play was over.

Elliot got there early because Elliot intended to be on his best behavior. The school was fairly new, or at least the theatre seemed to be; the entrance Elliot tried took him to a corridor that split, one end leading backstage and the other leading down another hallway where Elliot could hear singing. Elliot tried the stage first, for no reason other than nostalgia. It had been a while since he’d been inside a theatre. After the production of  _Iceman Cometh_ had gone well, he’d had offers to direct other plays for the same local company, but he’d been on the cusp of graduation and consumed with job-hunting and plays had been the last thing on his mind.

And, okay, maybe he’d been a little shaken by the Jonah thing. Still, he thought now, taking in that unique empty-auditorium smell, the curtain pulleys and catwalks, the romantic glow of the stage lights, the echo of his steps on the concrete: Part of him missed it. Hazel hadn’t been wrong about him playing himself in plays. He was much, much better at directing—he and Jonah had both aced all their stage direction courses at Emerson and done so mainly through a combination of arguing and one-upmanship—but it wasn’t like there was a particular deficit of theatre directors in Boston. Still, maybe he could do something local? For fun?

Would he even want that?

Elliot slipped out of the theatre and wandered back down the corridor towards the singing. He was halfway down the hall when he recognized the song as the big pre-intermission number, “Go, Go, Joseph,” and he was smiling when he reached the doorway. It was a large rehearsal room with mirrors lining one wall, a bunch of orchestra stands pushed to the back, a woman playing piano in the corner, and about 20 kids or so spread out across the center stage. They were nearing the end of the number, so the energy was high and everyone was more or less discoing around the performance space singing, occasionally getting prompted by a woman who seemed to be the choreographer. Elliot stayed back in the doorway; a few of the students noticed him, but most were focused on the song.

Jonah was standing in the corner near the doorway; Elliot spotted him through the mirrors on the back wall. He was next to another man with salt and pepper hair who seemed to be somebody’s dad, and Elliot caught himself wondering if there was some kind of penalty for Jonah deciding to sleep with a student’s parent before kicking himself for the thought. He’d never get back on Hazel’s good side by being an asshole to Jonah. And anyway, Jonah’s gaze was fixed on the students. He hadn’t even noticed Elliot.

The song came to an end with a big flourish and Elliot realized he was grinning from ear to ear.  The kids celebrated when the last note died away, and Jonah flashed them a smile.

“You,” he said, pointing to one kid who seemed to be one of the pharaoh's servants, “are supposed to be off-book. And you,” he added, pointing to the Narrator, “I want to hear you try those two lines up the octave. You’ve rehearsed it that way before, any reason why you changed?” She shrugged. “Well, you have the range, you should go for it. Let’s back up to the first verse. Oh, and everyone else, too many of you are still taking your choreography cues from Rachael, and when Rachael’s not prompting you, you’re all taking them from Shonda.”

They tittered, and someone affectionately punched a girl who was apparently Shonda on the shoulder. “Sam and Devon, putting you in the back does not mean you don’t have to dance. In fact, why don’t the two of you trade places with Shonda?”

The two of them groaned while everyone else laughed. “Don’t laugh, it could be you in front next,” Jonah grinned. “Let’s just take it from the top and—” he halted, and Elliot realized he’d spotted Elliot standing in the doorway— “and then we’ll break for the day.”

Elliot felt suddenly self-conscious standing there, and he tried not to visibly shrink against the door frame. Was he not supposed to be there? Would Jonah not want him there? Well. Obviously Jonah wouldn’t want him there; when did Jonah ever want Elliot around? But Jonah just sent him another look and then proceeded to ignore him. He was taking notes in a giant notebook he was holding, occasionally stopping to say something to the man with salt-and-pepper hair. Elliot watched them. The man with salt-and-pepper hair didn’t  _look_ like he was desperate to go home with Jonah, but Elliot had known Jonah long enough to know he was tricky that way—you never knew when someone was going to throw themselves at Jonah’s all-too-willing feet because that was apparently just the effect Jonah had on people.

Jonah in directing mode, though, wasn’t like Jonah in club mode or Jonah in class mode or Jonah in yelling-at-Elliot mode. He sent frequent encouraging smiles to the students and his eye seemed to catch on odd details as he made notes. Elliot wondered what they were. He watched the performers and imagined he were directing them—what would he have picked out? Jonah was right: the narrator had the range for the upper octave on that one line, but she didn’t sound confident at all; Elliot wondered if she was just shaky on the song or if she was shy about performing in front of her friends. Joseph was kind of a wet blanket, personality-wise, but then that was kind of the hilarious point of Joseph the character. Still, he could use an energy infusion about halfway through the song. As for the blocking... he thought of all the times he and Jonah had bickered over blocking in their staging exercises. No, he thought, watching the students. Jonah’s blocking was just fine.

“Hi,” said a voice, and Elliot looked down and realized a very short person with an intimidating-looking notebook and a hard stare was looking back up at him. “I’m Cosmo,” said the short person. “Are you lost?”

“No,” said Elliot. “I’m Elliot.” The short person seemed skeptical of this. “I’m a friend of Jonah’s.”

“Mr. Talbot?" asked the student, and Elliot found himself suppressing a laugh.

"Yeah," he said. "That would be him.”

"He's so cool," said Cosmo. “Do you like, work with him and stuff? Like, are you another actor?”

Elliot grinned. “Nah, we go back a little further than that.” Cosmo looked impressed. “I can tell you all his dark secrets.” Cosmo was clearly about to ask him for details, but before Elliot could indulge, Jonah came over at last.

“If it isn't La Divina, come to call on us,” Jonah greeted him. Elliot sent him an eyeroll. “I see you’re already hard at work corrupting my stage manager.”

“Oh yeah,” Elliot said. “That’s me, undermining your power structure.”

Jonah appeared to consult his notepad. “It’s a bit early in the production schedule for a coup,” he said. “You might try coming back for the final dress rehearsal.”

“No, see, that’s my backup plan if the coup fails,” Elliot said. “Kidnap Joseph on opening night and replace him and then blow everyone away with my vocal prowess.”

“I think you’re confusing this with another Lloyd Webber musical,” Jonah said, biting back a smile.

Elliot couldn’t resist countering, “Aren’t they all—”

—just as Jonah added, “I know, I know, they’re all—”

—and they ended, “the same,” in unison, and then grinned at each other.

Cosmo looked between them and pushed up their glasses like they thought this exchange was fascinating, and Elliot suddenly remembered Jonah telling him that anyone who didn’t know better would think they were flirting. Which was a good reminder, he told himself, that kids today didn’t get out much.

He waited for Jonah to ask him what he thought about the production, or else tell him to get lost and go wait for him in some other room; but Jonah did neither. Instead he just looked at Elliot for another moment, and Elliot looked back, and then Jonah pried his gaze away from Elliot back to the students, and Elliot looked over to see if salt-and-pepper-haired dude was paying any attention (he wasn’t) before relaxing and leaning against the doorway to enjoy the performance. He absolutely wasn’t mouthing,  _sha na na, Joseph, you’re doing fine_ , when Jonah cut another glance over at him and caught him. Elliot flushed. Jonah bit his lip and looked away again, and Elliot kept his lips sealed and his eyes firmly on the rehearsal, not on Jonah not watching him.

When the rehearsal ended, the students broke in a noisy wave of excitement and a bunch of them flocked around Jonah while others put all the orchestra stands and chairs back into rows for the next day’s rehearsal. Elliot helped them. It was a strange flashback to his own high school days, when he’d done productions like this while consumed with all the typical backstage drama of high school. He’d never imagined at the time there’d be a day when he wouldn’t be spending most of his time on or near a stage. He wondered if it was a sign of adulthood, giving up a hobby and moving on from acting like so many of them had, at least until the podcast; but the thought made him feel a little sad—and anyway, Jonah hadn’t given it up. He’d fought to be an actor and he’d been successful and hadn’t even had to move to New York permanently to do it. Honestly, it was no wonder Blake idolized him, Elliot thought, no wonder he’d gotten a profile in the  _Globe_. Jonah was one of  _those_ actors; he may not have been performing at the Old Vic, but that was because he didn’t want to be.

Ugh, it was almost like  _Jonah_ of all people was a better elitist than Elliot.

Without thinking too much about it, he dug out his phone and snapped a photo of Jonah where he stood consulting one of his notes. He’d laid his notebook on top of the upright piano and stood looking down over it, framed against one of the mirrored walls behind him. Elliot zoomed in and caught his profile, looking serious and thoughtful. Jonah looked up and saw him. “For the twitters,” Elliot said.

Jonah didn’t say anything in response, and Elliot was starting to be slightly unnerved by this serious Jonah who didn’t take time to stop and argue with him. He tweeted the photo of Serious Jonah from the Time Ravel twitter account with the caption,  _A true triple threat: he acts, directs, and time travels_.

Immediately Twitter lit up with likes and retweets; someone replied,  _That’s beautiful. Did Emerson take that photo?_ Elliot put his phone away, feeling oddly awkward and hoping Jonah wouldn’t notice that comment until after rehearsal.

The students gradually dispersed, the man with salt-and-pepper hair rounded up his kid and bid Jonah farewell without any appearance of apparent infatuation (although  _who could tell_?) and eventually the others were gone, and Elliot and Jonah were alone together, and it it was odd that no one else was there yet. Jonah calmly put away all his books and organized his messenger bag and then Elliot helped him gather up wayward musical scores and return them to the little locked office in the back corner of the room, and then Jonah said, “Thank you,” and this was all just  _weird_.

Elliot perched on the edge of the desk in the office and said, “So that looked fun.”

Jonah leaned against the closed door. “It is,” he said. “They want me to direct the fall musical as well but I think they’re just putting off appointing a permanent theatre department head and that’s no good for the students.”

“You don’t want to teach full-time,” said Elliot. “You’d hate it.”

“Maybe,” said Jonah, sounding unconvinced.

“No, really,” said Elliot. “It’s way too early to let go of your career.”

Jonah laughed. “I’m not letting anything go. I’m doing a new play at the Huntington right now and hopefully joining the New Rep company for the fall.”

“Excellent,” said Elliot, and then, because he’d been putting it off for as long as he could resist, he blurted, “What’s your staging like for the second act? Because for the pharaoh scenes you could do a really neat minimalist thing where the palace was like a structural expressionist, deconstructivist design, and you could have—”

“Sorry,” said Jonah calmly. He looked at Elliot as if he were about to deliver a prepared speech, and then he started speaking and Elliot realized that it  _was_ , it actually  _was_ a prepared speech.

“I know you’re going to want to be tempted, now that you’ve seen part of the show,” Jonah said, “to improve it. But this isn’t about you, Elliot. Or me. The students are doing the set designs and the students are doing the costumes and the show is a learning experience  _for them_. You will not turn it into one of your pet projects.”

“I—I wasn’t,” said Elliot, going red. “I was just suggesting—”

“Don’t,” said Jonah curtly, and Elliot had never been as grateful for an interruption in his life as Hazel bursting in a moment later, calling Jonah’s name and dragging her boyfriend in tow.

The podcast rehearsal was largely a blur. Elliot stayed mostly quiet and envisioned various ways of destroying all the items in Jonah’s wardrobe in lieu of Jonah himself. Nicholas, arriving late from a class that had run over schedule, barely noticed him, and Jonah sent him a few concerned looks but then got caught up in reading his part. This week Sebastian and the Mysterious Man were traveling back in time to the 19th century. But the Mysterious Man hadn’t showed up in a few months, and Sebastian was none too happy about the time lapse.

“Do you think you can just waltz back in here after  _three months_ and I’d be happy to see you?” Sebastian asked him. “What, did you think I’d be grateful you deigned to show up? A lot’s changed in New Antarctica since then. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe you don’t even know if the person in front of you is the person you met the last time you bothered to drop in.”

The Mysterious Man replied, “If that’s true, then at least allow me the chance to become as hungry for the new Sebastian as I was for the old one.”

“You—what?” Sebastian’s voice went blank with astonishment. Because Sebastian was a  _moron_.

The Mysterious Man let out a little laugh. “I can only assume you didn’t want to know exactly how much I wanted you.”

“That’s... that’s absurd. We—we hardly knew each other.”

“Oh, Sebastian. We knew each other instantly.”

And Jonah’s eyes flickered over to Elliot, and Elliot involuntarily snapped his sharpened pencil in two.

****

“What about the Patreon?” Hazel asked Elliot after rehearsal. “Is it all set to go?” It just figured that Hazel hadn’t wanted him at any other Time Ravel gatherings, but now that his head was hurting from an infusion of too much confusing quality time with Jonah, she was apparently determined to keep him there for the rest of eternity. No wonder Sebastian liked having a Mysterious Man swoop in to whisk him away from everything.

“It’s set,” Elliot said. “I’ll need the scripts you want to share, for the rewards. And we should probably do, like, some behind the scenes stuff. Commentaries and stuff.” Elliot had already written that into the reward levels, but he was suffering from a lack of enthusiasm for the idea at the moment.

“Oh, yes,” said Jonah heartily, “the infamous call-him-Emerson sessions. Much better than Waldo. Imagine, our couple name would have been Jaldo.”

“Or Jonaldo,” said Nicholas.

“So I’m going to call it a night,” announced Elliot, maybe a little too loudly, which made everyone look at him. “The podcast looks great. Sounds great. You know, the right word there. Everything’s going great. I’ll get the Patreon in line and, you know, it’s all great.”

“Great,” said Hazel.

“Great,” agreed Kate.

“Actually, Elliot, to thank you for all your hard work and to repay you for all the generosity,” Hazel continued, “I was thinking. Since you’re going to be running the Patreon anyway, it would probably make things easier if I just started listing you as a podcast producer. That way we can make any financial decisions we need to make jointly, and I don’t have to feel bad about you just gifting us free studio time.”

“Well,” said Elliot. “If you insist.”

“My my,” said Jonah. “It’s like having our own personal Medici patron.”

Elliot shot him a look. “Of course you think I’d be a terrible podcast producer,” he said.

“I didn’t say that,” said Jonah. “It’s just that the De Medicis’ patronage was ultimately all about the De Medicis and not so much about the artists.”

“Jonah, that’s unfair,” said Hazel. “Elliot’s been very supportive of the podcast.” Elliot beamed at her.

“In his way,” Jonah said, “I suppose he has.”

“You coming back to mine?” Nicholas asked, yawning, after Jonah had locked up for the night and they were all standing on the curb sorting out transportation. Elliot was still so preoccupied with all the unpleasant things he wanted to do to Jonah that for a moment he couldn’t remember what he would even be  _doing_ at Nicholas’s place.

“No,” he said, and Nicholas did a double take. “I’ve... got a thing,” he babbled. “A work thing. In the morning.”

“Okay,” said Nicholas. “I was talking about grabbing drinks with Caroline anyway, I guess I’ll see if she’s around.” He sounded baffled.

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “Tell her I said hi. Pet Ian Purrtis for me.”

Everything, absolutely everything, felt weird and out of sorts. Nicholas gave him another one of his increasingly weirded-out looks and walked off to get his Lyft.

“Elliot.” Elliot turned and realized Jonah had been watching them. “About what I said earlier,” Jonah said.

“It’s fine,” said Elliot. “You don’t need to worry, I won’t come to your rehearsals.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Jonah. “You’re more than welcome to come to the rehearsals. I just don’t want you to interfere or make the students second-guess their decision-making.”

“I won’t,” said Elliot, feeling unfairly chastened. “Your students can turn Pharaoh’s palace into Waterworld for all I care. Have fun.”

“They will,” said Jonah, looking amused. “That’s the point.”

“Fine,” said Elliot,  unnecessarily.

“He sulks,” said Jonah.

“He thinks you’re a condescending ass,” said Elliot, aware that he sounded sulky.

Jonah said, “Qui se ressemble s'assemble,” and Elliot definitely didn’t grind his teeth in frustration.

“I’m going home,” he said. “Now.”

“Do you want to split a Lyft?” Jonah asked.

“We live on completely opposite sides of the city,” said Elliot. Jonah said nothing.

“Ugh,” said Elliot. “Yes.”

They argued all the way to Jonah’s apartment.

****

As much as Elliot had earnestly and firmly initially told himself that he was going to stay politely out of Nicholas’s way and let him do his own social media, the truth was that Nicholas was abysmally bad at updating Tumblr. He was far better at updating Twitter, specifically interacting with fans. And he was good at answering Tumblr asks, too. It was just the Tumblring part of Tumblr he ignored, and the witty tweeting part of Twitter he failed to pay attention to.

So Elliot, occasionally, liked to help. Which meant that inevitably Elliot wound up interacting with Jonah.

@thischarmlessem:  _Thanks for a great rehearsal @timeravel! Looking forward to the recording_.

@letmejonahtainu: I hope you’re planning on keeping that thing you did with your voice.

@thischarmlessem: that thing I did with my voice, i.e. speaking. Yes, I’m keeping that.

@letmejonahtainu: you demur but there was definitely a thing. that happened. with your voice. I’m sure the listeners will notice.

@thischarmlessem: Jonah, if everything you read sex into were actually sexy we’d all be too busy to do this podcast.

@letmejonahtainu:  _Emerson_ , if only you’d admit that everything is sex this podcast could be a lot more interesting (and I keep plenty busy, not to worry)

@thischarmlessem: (Who’s worrying?) Allow me to amend: We’d all be too busy and Apple Podcast would censor this podcast into oblivion.

@letmejonahtainu: Clearly Apple Podcast hasn’t cottoned onto that thing you do with your voice or the whole podcast would be illegal. (You, apparently.)

@thischarmlessem: ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

@letmejonahtainu: 

“Okay, time to let me take over the Twitter,” said Nicholas, glancing up idly from his piles of anatomy textbooks. “I can actually hear you glowering at your phone from across the room.”

“It’s just,” said Elliot meaningfully, “ _Jonah_.”

Nicholas snorted and then dug out his phone to read the tweets himself. “This is great, though,” he said. “The fans will eat it up.”

Right on cue a new message from a fan landed in Time Ravel’s open Tumblr dashboard.

“It’s not the fans I’m concerned about,” Elliot muttered.

“Jonah and I have an understanding,” Nicholas said, sounding bored. “It’s fine.” He cut a glance over at Elliot. “And anyway, he’s right. He stays busy.”

Elliot glowered at his phone some more.  _You know that I know that you know when it’s me_ , he sent Jonah via Twitter DM.

 _If you’d like for me to tweet flirtily with you instead of with Emerson, that can easily be arranged_ , Jonah DM’d back.

 _How about no one tweets flirtily with anyone_ , Elliot replied.

 _That would be terrible social media management_ , said Jonah.

 _I’m an excellent social media manager_ , Elliot answered,  _and I somehow manage to do my job without flirting with anyone._

 _But just think how much better a social media manager you’d be if you flirted with everyone_ , Jonah responded.

 _You mean horrify my clients and weird out everyone on Twitter, I’ll get right on that_.

 _I meant make everyone fall in love with you_ , Jonah replied, and that was too silly to respond to, so Elliot shut his phone down and helped Nicholas memorize body parts until he fell asleep on the couch.

****

Except for the requisite social media flirting, which Elliot was reticent to actually define as flirting for  _so many reasons_ , Jonah and Elliot didn’t interact much until the following Tuesday when Elliot returned to the school for the next rehearsal.

But then Elliot stopped off at Seattle’s Best on the way, and then he thought he might as well pick up coffee for Jonah, too, and then he thought it would be rude if he left out Mary the pianist, and Cosmo, and that somehow turned into Elliot and Elliot’s Lyft driver carefully carrying 25 cups of coffee into rehearsal, and the students all stopped in the middle of counting Potiphar’s cows and whooped excitedly, and Elliot kind of felt like a conquering hero, and Jonah turned and saw him and smiled and didn’t even yell at him for derailing the rehearsal, and Elliot ducked his head and busied himself with unloading all the coffee cups.

“Ooh, is that hazelnut?” said Jonah in his showiest stage voice, coming over. “I'll take one for me and one for Mary.” Then he stage-whispered, “Actually, they're both for me.”

The students all laughed.

“No, I’m pretty sure this one’s for you,” said Elliot, pointing to an espresso. “Black, like your soul.”

“And yet you brought all of that extra cream and sugar,”  Jonah said, totally unruffled and helping himself to a hazelnut. “You’re not fooling anyone.” He turned to the students while Elliot was still trying to think of a sufficient retort that absolutely couldn’t be described as flirting. “Since everyone was finally off book today, let’s end here for the day,” he said. “You guys grab a coffee and I’ll see you next week.” And the students all cheered and then besieged Elliot and the coffee.

“Are you Mr. Talbot’s boyfriend?” one boy asked him as he was handing out stirrers.

“No,” said Elliot, narrowly refraining from adding,  _Mr. Talbot doesn’t have boyfriends_. Instead he said, “We’re just—I’m Elliot.”

The boy said, “I’m Marshall. I play Benjamin.”

“Nice,” said Elliot. “You get your own song, that’s cool.”

“Are you here as like an assistant?”

Elliot looked back at Jonah, who was surrounded by teenagers, answering questions and discussing schedules and trading quips. “Something like that,” he said. “I’m doing social media for one of his other projects.”

“Oh, cool,” said Marshall. “You should talk to Tovah, she’s doing our social stuff for the play. Hey, Tovah.” So then Elliot met Tovah.

“We have an Instagram and a Snapchat,” she told him. “Oh, and a Facebook page, but, like, whatever.”

“Do you know how to check your Instagram analytics?” Elliot asked her. She shrugged, so he dug out his phone and walked her through his favorite free metrics app. Then he said, “Hey, show me how you’re tagging posts, I could use some tips,” and she beamed.

She and Marshall were scrolling through their phones showing him the photos from their latest rehearsal, and Elliot was suggesting tweaks to their tags and ways to improve their photo collection, when he felt Jonah’s eyes on him from across the room. He looked up and felt that sudden familiar consciousness of having been seen through, as he always did whenever he hung around Jonah for too long. Only this time it felt different; this time Jonah at least didn’t seem to disapprove of whatever it was he saw when he looked at Elliot that way.

“You should ask him out,” said Marshall. “You’d be cute together.”

“I have a question,” Elliot said. “Why are teens always trying to matchmake adults?”

“Uh, because it’s fun,” said Tovah. “And we matchmake each other, too, you’re not special.”

“Are you even an adult?” said Marshall. “You look about 18.”

Tovah laughed. “Mr. Talbot could be your sugar daddy.”

“Oh, my god, gross,” said Marshall.

“I think you mean  _hot_ ,” said Tovah, and they dissolved into peals of laughter.

Elliot stared at them and then joined in, a little shrilly. “First, I’m 24, not 18,” he said, and then, because he was in some kind of no-man’s land where teenage strangers read him like an instantly open book, he blurted, “And it’s not like that. Jonah isn’t—and I’m sort of in a relationship with someone else. Maybe.”

Saying it out loud like that felt weird and bitter and wrong.

Tovah snorted. “Mr. Talbot’s definitely gay, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“I know that,” Elliot said, wondering why he was feeling so defensive.  _Teens_. “I’ve known him for six years, we lived together, I know he’s gay.”

“It’s not a big deal,” said Tovah. “A bunch of us are queer.”

Marshall gave him a little thumbs up.

“That’s great?” said Elliot. “What is happening right now?”

“So when you lived together,” said Marshall. “Were you all like—” and he broke off and waggled his eyebrows.

“No!” said Elliot. “No, we weren’t all like, like whatever that was supposed to mean. We were just... it was sort of weird but definitely the total opposite of that eyebrow thing you just did.”

Marshall and Tovah exchanged looks, and Elliot realized that this was probably a hideously inappropriate conversation to be having with Jonah’s students, so he swallowed and said desperately, “So these hashtags,” and they exchanged glances but let him deflect his way back into talking about Instagram. He successfully managed to distract them from the topic, but then Tovah’s friend Haven joined them and they introduced Elliot to her as “Mr. Talbot’s totally-not-boyfriend,” which... whatever, Elliot was going to pick his battles and do his best not to get Jonah fired.

As he’d done the previous week, Elliot helped rearrange the chairs and band stands for the orchestra the next day and the students helped him tidy up from the coffee, which was nice. This time there were no salt-and-pepper-haired fathers standing too close to and getting too chatty with the director, which meant Elliot found himself alone with Jonah once again before any of the others had showed up for the podcast rehearsal.

“Thank you for the coffee,” Jonah told him politely. He was leaning against the piano, and Elliot sat down and played a few bars of not-actually music.

“You don’t play piano,” Jonah said in some surprise.

“Correction,” Elliot said. “I don’t play piano  _well_.” He launched into a broken rendition of one of the only songs he could still remember how to play. He’d had a few years of intermittent and indifferent piano lessons, but he’d sat down one afternoon as a highly impressionable sixteen-year-old after becoming temporarily obsessed with Adam Lambert singing “Mad World” like every other highly impressionable sixteen-year-old until he had a paltry, threadbare rendition of it stuck in his brain. Jonah watched him falter over the keys and sent him a soft smile, and Elliot abruptly felt exposed and self-conscious.

“No, don’t stop,” said Jonah, and he sat down on the piano bench beside Elliot and started improvising the harmony in the upper notes, and it wasn’t polished or perfect, but it was nice, and Jonah was warm and solid pressed against him like he’d been at the Hong Kong, and Elliot kept playing and wondering when Jonah learned to play piano or if he’d had an indifferent musical education like Elliot, off on his lonely rich Cape Cod estate with his asshole parents, and possibly this song was too depressing to make a duet out of, but they did a decent job, and it was sort of hilarious and kind of sweet.

“I’d’ve thought this song was too emo for you,” Elliot told him.

“Please,  _Donnie Darko_ is a classic,” Jonah said, giving the melodic line a flourish. “Besides, everyone had their Adam Lambert thing.”

Elliot snorted. Jonah looked at him. “You didn’t have an Adam Lambert thing?”

“Possibly,” Elliot said, “But I was over him by the time he was appearing on  _Rolling Stone_ covers draped in pythons.”

“That does seem rather anti- the Elliot aesthetic,” Jonah said.

“It’s just,” Elliot waved a hand to indicate a mix of  _crass_ and  _gaudy_ and  _designed to make me feel uncomfortable things_. Jonah lifted an eyebrow.

“I held on to that issue for years,” he said. “I still have it somewhere, in fact. At the time, I’d just recently been kicked out of my parents’ house and, well. He was inspirational.”

Elliot paused, mid-note. “You were young,” he said. “Young to be taking Glambert and  _Velvet Goldmine_ as your behavioral model.”

Jonah hummed. “Not really. He was clearly having the time of his life and not giving any fucks and making no apologies for who he was. I needed that when I was 17.” He looked at Elliot. “It’s not as if queer men have a laundry list of out matinee idols to choose from. I get Lambert, you get... Matt Bomer.”

Elliot narrowed his eyes. “What’s wrong with Matt Bomer? Matt Bomer is  _beautiful_.”

“Not a thing in the world. He’s stunning. And his image is chaste and non-threatening and practically asexual—it’s 100 percent aesthetic beauty and fashion. Nothing could be more fitting.”

Elliot swallowed. “I’m not chaste,” he said.

Jonah’s expression seemed to narrow in focus, and Elliot was suddenly aware of how close they were, side by side on the piano bench. The warmth of Jonah’s thigh against his hadn’t felt so charged a moment before, but Jonah’s eyes, always so sharp when he looked at Elliot, had gone dark, and Elliot shivered.

“No,” Jonah said. “I never thought you were. But you hate overt displays of any kind. I suspect you require more... subtle forms of address.”

And then Nicholas walked in and said delightedly, “Hey, who brought coffee?” and Jonah took his hand off the piano and placed it on Elliot’s knee for an instant before he said in his usual boisterous show-voice, “That would be Elliot,” and got up and left Elliot sitting there, like he’d just shoved Elliot casually into a hot spring and then walked away.

Elliot stared at him, cheeks burning, fixated on the fading warmth where Jonah’s broad hand had splayed against him, the  _subtle form of address_ as subtle as an air raid siren. But Jonah had already moved straight to flirting with Nicholas, like it was nothing, like Elliot was nothing, and Nicholas was already flirting back, and suddenly Elliot wanted to scream.

“We'll need it,” Nicholas was saying. “The script for this ep is, wow.”

Jonah laughed and dramatically flung his arm around Nicholas' waist. “Mon amour,” he said in an exaggerated accent.

“Oh, mon dieu!” said Nicholas in a lady’s shocked voice. Then, in his own, he looked over at Elliot. “Anyone filming this?” he said. “Gotta cater to the Jemerson shippers.”

“I still prefer Jonahson,” Jonah said, and Nicholas was still leaning into him and Jonah  _still had his arm around Nicholas' waist_ , and Elliot snapped, “You would prefer the version that has  _your entire name_ in it.”

For a moment he thought he’d ruined everything, again; but then Jonah laughed, loudly, and Nicholas laughed, too, which somehow just made everything worse.

“It’s a moot point, anyway,” said Jonah. “The fans have obviously already spoken, and we can’t argue with what the fans want, can we?”

“No,” said Elliot, wondering why everything in his life had to be some sort of fucking code for something else he barely understood. “Cheers to the fans in their infinite wisdom.”

“Are you okay?” said Nicholas.

Elliot drained all his coffee at once even though it meant he was going to have a scorched tongue for a week. “Fine,” he said, strained. “Great.”

Jonah gave him one of those looks that said he wasn’t fooling anyone, and Elliot barely refrained from flipping him off.

****

Over the next week Nicholas entered a period of intense studying for his med school finals, which meant he was stressed and irritable and Elliot brought him extra cases of snooty craft beer and made him peanut butter sandwiches and actually cleaned the living room on the nights he slept over. A few nights he had his study group over — they were generally a bunch of wide-eyed, exhausted, nerdy strangers Elliot didn’t really know what to do with, so he made sure they all had drinks and mostly left them alone. Nicholas liked them anyway, so, whatever.

Around the same time Nicholas started tweeting as Emerson more. “Do you think Emerson would like weird fiction?” he asked Elliot one afternoon.

“I think probably not?” said Elliot, “because, if you’ll recall, Emerson is  _you_ , and you don’t like weird fiction.”

“I could like weird fiction,” said Nicholas. “Maybe I’ve just never tried the right sort. Maybe Emerson reads more than I do.”

“Emerson is a busy exhausted med school student who barely has time to read textbooks, much less anything else,” Elliot said. “Where is this all coming from?”

Nicholas shrugged. “I’m just enjoying the change,” he said. “You know. It’s nice to be someone else for a while.”

“You didn’t like who you were before?” Elliot said.

Nicholas frowned at him. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I just think it’s fun to play around with. You know, Emerson gets to be a lot cooler than I am. He’s mysterious and fun. And thanks to you and Jonah he’s sexy.”

“What?” said Elliot. “What does that mean?”

“I just mean the way the two of you flirt,” Nicholas said. “On social media.”

“It’s not as if the two of  _you_ aren’t flirting on social media,” Elliot said. “Or off it for that matter.”

“That’s different,” said Nicholas.

“How is it different? You’re the one who wants to be more like Emerson, but if anything you and Emerson do roughly the same amount of flirting with Jonah.”

“Okay, how did this turn into a fight about Jonah?” said Nicholas. “Have you noticed a lot of our fights are about Jonah lately?”

“We don’t  _have_ fights,” said Elliot miserably. “I’m not fighting! And there’s nothing about Jonah to fight over.”

“Really,” said Nicholas. “Are you sure?” said Nicholas. “Because you and Jonah—”

“Oh my  _god_ ,” Elliot burst out. “Why does  _everyone think there’s something happening between me and Jonah_?”

“Well, for starters, it’s because you’re reacting like that,” said Nicholas.

“What if there was?” Elliot snapped, staring firmly at the place where Ian Purrtis lay purring on his stomach, because Jonah’s hand on his knee for that brief instant had been on a loop in his mind all week, and Elliot had spent the week getting very good at explaining it away as a casual accidental touch, but suddenly the whole moment felt huge and melodramatic, like a giant guilty secret he’d been keeping from Nicholas for no reason—

—except that thought was equally frustrating, because why should it matter if he and Jonah were, were, whatever they were?  _He and Nicholas weren’t together_. They weren’t in a relationship, and they’d never been in a relationship, and if he looked at Nicholas right now he’d probably do something unbearable like punching him or kissing him, and it was all too much.

“If I said, right now, there’s something between me and Jonah, what would you do?”

“I’d... I’d say congratulations,” said Nicholas carefully.

“Of course you would,” Elliot muttered.

“What is  _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” said Elliot viciously, and Ian Purrtis yowled at him and ran away in a huff.  _That makes two of us_ , he thought.

“If there  _is_ something happening between you and Jonah, you know you can talk about it, right?” said Nicholas in the most awkward way possible, and Elliot looked at him for a long moment, wondering if Nicholas thought he was lying to both of them or if he was just lying to himself.

“Maybe there is,” he blurted, gauging Nicholas’ reaction. Nicholas’ temple throbbed and he swallowed, and then he very deliberately said nothing at all, and Elliot, for a startling moment, kind of hated him for it.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’m realizing I was an asshole to Jonah and he’s slowly getting around to forgiving me for it. Maybe by the time this podcast is over we’ll all be friends again. Wouldn’t that be  _great_? Us all being friends again?”

“Of course it would,” Nicholas said blankly. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Nevermind,” said Elliot, and Nicholas suddenly changed the subject and started talking about inane med school things, and Elliot let him, and it was weird and awkward, just like everything between them was weird and awkward lately.

When the next Tuesday rolled around Elliot was almost glad for the excuse to head to Jonah’s school a little early. This time he didn’t bring coffee for the students, but they still smiled when he walked in, and Jonah smiled, too, and Elliot flushed and looked down at his shoes, which was roughly when Mary the pianist glanced at her phone and then suddenly stood up and yelped, “I just won the _Hamilton_ lottery!” and grabbed her purse and rushed out of the room.

“Er,” said Jonah, staring at the empty piano bench.

“I got you, fam,” said Elliot, parking himself there. Jonah raised his eyebrows. “What?” Elliot said. “I can play well enough to get you through rehearsal, at least.”

Jonah looked dubious, but said, “Well then, take it from the top of Act 2, if you please.”

“Look,” said Elliot some time later, “I’m just bad at sight-reading.”

“You really,  _really_ are,” said Jonah, laughing nearly uncontrollably as he called an end to rehearsal.

“Lots of people are bad at sight-reading!”

“No, I assure you,” said Jonah, still laughing, “that was tremendous. Thank you for your service. Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is currently wandering some British cemetery looking for an open grave so he can crawl into it and then turn over. But thank you.”

Elliot sulked at him, but it was difficult, because Jonah was  _still laughing_ , and Elliot wanted to be mad at him for it, but he really couldn’t be, and Jonah was looking at him like—like—

Elliot reached for his only line of immediate defense; he raised his phone and snapped Jonah’s picture. “For social media,” he shrugged, when Jonah raised an eyebrow. But then he looked down at the picture, at Jonah’s face, and the look on it, and he wasn’t sure how he could spin it as having anything to do with the podcast.

“I’m telling you, you should just ask him out,” Tovah said to Elliot as the students were leaving. “You’re really cute together, I ship it.”

“You can’t start shipping it,” Elliot said, feeling himself turn red. “I do not give you permission to ship me and Jonah.”

“Oh,” she said. “I totally didn’t need your permission.”

“Did I hear that correctly?” said Jonah, turning back to them. “Are we getting shipped?” Elliot’s face turned redder.

“No!” he said. “No one is getting shipped with anyone.”

“That line never works out well for you,” Jonah said mildly. “Does that mean we get a ship name?” he asked Tovah.

“Elliot plus Jonah equals Jelliot,” said Tovah. “Oh my god.”

“You can’t ship us if you’re going to call our ship  _Jelliot_ ,” said Elliot in horror. “Jelliot is terrible. Try, I don’t know, Ellionah. That at least sounds elegant. Or, I don’t know, Jonellah.”

“I like Joliot,” said Jonah.

“No,” said Tovah. “It’s totally got to be Jelliot.”

Elliot groaned.

“You can’t win every aesthetic battle,” Jonah said placidly.

“But I should,” said Elliot.

Jonah. “You say that now, but Team Jelliot would undoubtedly be an aesthetic triumph. I mean the fabric combos alone—” And then he turned away to answer a student’s question, and Tovah punched him in the arm, and Elliot was going to die of embarrassment.

The rehearsal went off without a hitch, and as usual Elliot mostly snapped photos and scheduled inane tweets and made Tumblr posts teasing upcoming plot points. Hazel had been excited all evening about some big romantic moment between Sebastian and the Mysterious Man that came near the end of the rehearsal. After having retrieved the first two documents from the annals of lost history together with Sebastian, this time the Mysterious Man had intended to travel back to the mid-22nd century alone, in order to unearth a document produced in the middle of a massive continental labor riot. The document was crucial, according to the Mysterious Man, in setting off a chain of events that could lead to the restoration of peace; but to retrieve it, he would almost certainly have to risk his life in the midst of the labor riots, and he wasn’t about to let Sebastian come with him.

“You don’t get to make that decision,” Sebastian told him. “You don’t get to come into my life and send everything about it into upheaval and then decide that you get to say enough is enough.”

“You say that as if I didn’t know you,” the Mysterious Man replied. “As if I didn’t know that you don’t have any limits. You think I don’t know you’d give whatever you could, and keep giving, to save this wretched city, if you thought you could?”

“I’m not talking about the city,” Sebastian said. “That’s not what I’m trying to save.”

The Mysterious Man laughed. “You’d do all that for someone you barely know? Someone you said yourself you only just met a few months ago?”

“Why not? Everything you do for a crush is ridiculous. Why not this?”

At this, the Mysterious Man snorted. “You think a crush is what this is? Between you and me?”

“Why not?” said Sebastian defensively. “What would you call it?”

The Mysterious Man scoffed. “You tell me. You’ve kept your door open for me all this time. You could have closed the portal but you haven’t. You could have turned me into the authorities but you haven’t. You keep ridiculous mementos of me,  _dangerous_ momentos, lying around where probably anyone could find them, but you can't bring yourself to get rid of them.”

And then... and then Jonah went off script.

The mood in the room shifted as they each double-taked, but the Mysterious Man continued, just as though the words he were saying were right there on the page:

“You obsess over the day you last saw me. You pretend you don’t care what I think even as you’re going out of your way to make sure I always notice you, that I can always find you. You go out of your way to impress me and then you tell yourself you don’t want me. You want me so much you can barely stand to be in the same  _room_ with me. You can barely breathe for jealousy when I look at someone who’s not you—and then when I finally do look at you, you can’t bear to look at me. You’ve convinced yourself I’m toying with you, that I might be mocking you, but if you’d just stand still for once in your life and stop  _lying_ to yourself, you’d know—you’d  _know_ , Sebastian—that this isn’t a crush.”

Nicholas, caught up in the speech like the rest of them, looked at Jonah for a long electric moment. Elliot realized suddenly that he was watching Jonah so closely that he’d stopped breathing.

And then Jonah ended, “This is every part of you belonging to every part of me,” and then he paused and added, out of character, “And then I kissed Nicholas desperately and hopefully we get a hundred thousand downloads.”

There was another fraught, electric pause in which no one in the room moved, before Nicholas said said, sounding wrecked, “Holy shit. Did you seriously just improv all that?”

“I think I got most of it down to add into the script,” said Hazel’s boyfriend.

Hazel leaned over and said, “Isn’t it  _amazing_?”

Elliot jumped, startled, having forgotten all about her presence next to him.

“People are going to  _love_ it, right?” she continued, her eyes bright.

Elliot gaped at her, momentarily devoid of words. Probably, Elliot thought, objectively, as the podcast producer in charge of social media, he should be ecstatic at how easily this was going to promote itself. He was going to be rolling around in Tumblr asks and Twitter @s. There would be hashtags galore. There would be more art and more fic and it was all probably a really good thing.

But—but  _Jonah_. He thought back over the words of Jonah’s speech and felt his stomach turning over. Jonah hadn’t said any of it  _to him_. He’d left Elliot an out. Jonah was  _always_  leaving Elliot outs, always giving him some kind of wiggle room to keep maintaining plausible deniability that nothing was happening between them.

He’d done the same thing that day in the Black Box—he’d given Elliot the chance to say something to keep him from leaving and Elliot hadn’t. Elliot had just... told himself Jonah’s pride was hurt.

And then there was Nicholas, who seemed... if not completely oblivious, at least completely unfazed by any of it. Just like always.

Apparently they were done rehearsing, because Nicholas' voice cut in, his Sebastian purr dropped. “How was that? Was that good?”

“That was  _perfect_ ,” Hazel assured them enthusiastically. “It was so good. Wasn’t it good, Elliot?”

Elliot thought Hazel must be the least perceptive person on the planet not to realize that Elliot wasn’t in the mood to gush. “So good,” he said, with his best Cheshire cat smile, reminding himself that he wasn’t much of an actor, but he was very, very good at pretending to be  _himself_.

“Do we need to practice the kiss?” asked Jonah, deadpan. “Probably we need to practice the kiss.”

“Ha,” said Nicholas. “You need to at least buy me dinner first. I’m no cheap date.”

“The lady has demands,” rejoined Jonah mildly.

“Indeed,” Nicholas agreed. He was flipping through his script. He was bantering with Jonah automatically, and Jonah hadn’t looked at Elliot at all since delivering that impromptu tour de force.

Elliot wanted Jonah to look at him. Elliot also wanted to  _die_.

Elliot rubbed at his temples. He had a vicious headache. It was probably the coffee he’d drunk too quickly. Next to him, Hazel’s boyfriend was scribbling away. What could be left to fucking write? Elliot thought, sourly. Elliot felt like Hazel’s boyfriend must have written everything in the universe by this point.

“I think we should have a party,” announced Kate at the end of the rehearsal as they were all packing up. “The season ends in just a few more episodes. We should have a party before the big finale.”

Hazel gasped dramatically. “That’s such a great idea. Don’t you think that’s a great idea, Elliot?”

Why was Elliot involved with whatever parties Kate and Hazel might want to have? “Sure,” he said, bewildered. “Knock yourselves out. Just check with Blake that you don’t step on the toes of his monthly-weekly-whatever party.”

“No, silly.” Hazel actually gave him a little shove, looking like he was hilarious. “A  _Time Ravel_ party. For all the fans. The local fans, at least. We have some, right?”

They had some. They tweeted at Emerson James wanting to know brunch recommendations, or bookstore recommendation, or the best place to bring someone on a romantic date. Elliot said, “Oh. Yeah. I guess. We could do that.”

“I think it would be fantastic,” said Hazel. “We, as the producers of the podcast, should throw a party!”

“We could aim for the finale in two weeks,” Kate said.

“That’s a good idea.” Nicholas looked at Elliot. “My exams will be over by then. It would give you enough time to plan it, right?”

Elliot could plan a kick-ass party in a couple of hours while mostly being drunk. He knew from experience. He gave Nicholas a look and said shortly, “Yes, it’s enough time.”

“Excellent!” said Hazel, clapping Elliot on the back. “Then it’s all set. You can make all the social media arrangements?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Elliot smiled thinly.

“Excellent,” said Hazel again. “We should celebrate. Are we hungry?”

“Starving,” said Jonah. “These are back-to-back rehearsal days for me so I skipped lunch.”

“Oh, Caroline said she was heading over to the Paramount,” Nicholas volunteered. “If we want to join her I’ll text her to grab a table for all of us.”

So somehow they all wound up at the Paramount, nestled in a corner and making most of the dining room noise after the evening dinner crowd had already come and gone. Caroline and Nicholas played Wes Anderson editions of Fuck Marry Kill over rounds of beer, and Elliot attempted to join in because he had so many  _Rushmore_ opinions, but he kept getting distracted by how hard he found it to avoid looking at Jonah, even though Jonah, sandwiched across the table between Hazel and Kate, was evidently perfectly fine not looking at him, and so far Team Jelliot was clearly a total joke, and Elliot didn’t know why he was so irritated and annoyed with everything, and he had no idea why Jonah might want to look at him occasionally, since it wasn’t like Jonah had just dropped a  _giant spontaneous love letter_ to him in the middle of rehearsal.

Maybe it hadn’t been a love letter at all. Maybe Elliot was reading into things. Maybe he’d been reading too much into all of this and Jonah was just putting up with him, longsuffering for the sake of Hazel and her beloved podcast. Maybe Elliot didn’t care what Jonah thought, anyway.

He grew more and more sullen and definitely wasn’t sulking, even though Jonah probably would have disagreed if Jonah had bothered to actually pay him any attention, until at last the quiet conversation Hazel and Kate were having about some Jane Austen continuation Kate was reading crept into his awareness. Elliot loved Jane Austen, but Elliot rarely  _admitted_ to loving Jane Austen, so Elliot tried valiantly to ignore this Jane Austen conversation until he heard Hazel say that everyone knew Fanny Brice should have ended up with the Crawfords instead of Edmund and he had to,  _had to_ , jump in.

“Hazel, that’s just not true,” he blurted. “Edmund and Fanny represent the basic stability of proper landed gentry society that Austen wanted to preserve.”

“Wait, you’ve read  _Mansfield Park_?” asked Kate.

“Of course I have,” said Elliot. “The whole point was that Fanny made all the proper choices in favor of preserving the social strata, not the easy fun ones like running away with the Crawfords. That’s what made her a worthy member of society and got her Mansfield in the end.”

“ _You’ve_ read  _Mansfield Park_ ,” said Kate.

“Well,” said Elliot. “A person’s relationship with Austen isn’t something they just bandy about.” Kate snorted.

“Oh, come on, Elliot,” Hazel said. “You can’t seriously think Fanny enjoyed herself more when she was with Edmund. Heck,  _Edmund_ wanted the Crawfords more than he wanted Fanny.”

“Sure, but that was part of the problem, that Edmund wanted them,” Elliot said. “Austen was a social satirist. Her happy endings were thematic, they were about serving social purposes, not indulging characters. Fanny didn’t  _want_ the Crawfords’ flaky lifestyle — she wanted Edmund and his stodgy sermons and his air of respectability and legitimacy and his country manor. Jane Austen thought that was what was best for her because Jane distrusted cities and too much licentious fun and theatre.”

Hazel laughed at him like he’d just said something funny. “She did!” Elliot protested. “She hated Bath because it was full of superficial shallow people and she mocked Gothic romances and she devoted a whole middle act of  _Mansfield Park_ to  _bashing plays_. If you want fictional characters who put their hearts first and social continuity second you have to go to the Brontes. Or really to Heyer.”

“Who?” said Hazel, and Elliot looked at her sadly.

“You’re not wrong about Fanny Brice,” said Jonah abruptly, and Elliot turned to him in surprise. “But what she wants for herself in this instance and whether what she wants is actually  _good_ for her is debatable.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to settle down to domestic life with a nice quiet young man who treats you well who you’ve known practically your whole life?” said Elliot. “Fanny’s choices make total sense for her. She’s quiet and unassuming and simple and the only reason people hate the way  _Mansfield Park_ ends is that they want something flashier and exciting for her that she doesn’t want for herself.”

“But don’t you see?” Jonah asked him, his voice strangely earnest, his eyes bright. “They don’t want her to simply settle for the quiet domestic life and the familiar setting she’s gotten used to because they see her as capable of doing more, having more,  _being_ more. That’s the whole reason we root for romantic couples in fiction to begin with, isn’t it? We want them to become more than they were as individuals, together. And how you read the ending of  _Mansfield Park_ has everything to do with what kind of person you want Fanny to be.”

“Jonah, you read Jane Austen?” said Hazel, elbowing him. “How did I not know this? I think you’re obligated to tell your best friend when you’re a secret romance novel lover.”

“Well, one doesn’t simply bandy about one’s love of Austen,” Jonah said, flashing Elliot a smile. “Besides, I prefer Georgette.”

“ _Stop_ ,” Elliot blurted. “Were you hiding your secret romance collection in a locked vault when we were roommates? How did I not know this?”

“It’s called a Kindle app,” said Jonah dryly.

“Who’s Georgette?” asked Caroline, looking over at Elliot.

“An old friend,” said Elliot, looking at Jonah a bit wildly. “Look, you can’t just say things like ‘I prefer Georgette’ and not elaborate.”

“Well,” said Jonah, “I will say this. When I was a kid my parents heavily filtered my media for me, so I wound up reading a voracious amount of romances that I snuck from my mom’s bedroom. Luckily for me Heyer’s universe was teeming with strapping young men in tight Regency riding pants all exchanging ribald innuendo with one another. I fell in love with many a Heyer hero before I really understood that I was gay.”

“But Heyer was blatantly homophobic,” Elliot said. “She wrote queer subtext like some sort of proto-Tumblr shipper, and yet she constantly mocked effeminacy and the dandy set.”

“Well, our problematic faves don’t always know themselves,” said Jonah. “Besides, people still mock effeminacy and the dandy set, they just do it in the name of preserving traditional families, et cetera.” His lips tightened, and Elliot realized he’d stumbled upon Jonah’s sore spot; he’d been too flamboyant for his own traditional family.

“It’s true,” he said hastily, reaching for a quick subject change. “Heyer was a pretty standard Tory so it’s impossible to know what she’d be today. And it’s not like Austen didn’t have her blind spots, too.”

“Right, we’ve all read  _Longbourn_ ,” said Kate.

“Sure,” said Elliot. “I was thinking of, like, her homoerotic subtext.”

“Austen has homoerotic subtext?” asked Caroline.

“Yes,” said Jonah and Elliot and Kate all in unison.

“So many intense female friendships,” Kate sighed.

“For instance,” said Jonah, “there’s Austen’s whole tendency to pair up young women like Fanny with stodgy older men after first destabilizing their worldviews through semi-homoerotic relationships with other young women.”

“Like Miss Crawford and Jane Fairfax and Harriet Smith,” said Elliot, staring at him. “And the Musgroves for that matter. Huh.”

“But the heroine usually felt contempt for all those other women,” said Hazel.

“No,” said Kate. “She felt,” she air quoted, “‘ _contempt_.’”

“I like to think Austen hid a great deal of secret truth in all that animosity,” said Jonah, still looking at Elliot.

“Okay, this conversation is officially queerer than I can participate in,” said Hazel, yawning. “Are you ready to go, honey?” She looked next to her, and Elliot realized with something like a shock that Hazel’s boyfriend had been sitting in the corner, apparently writing furiously and invisibly throughout dinner.

“I’m gonna take off, too,” said Nicholas, getting to his feet. “I’m in the middle of exam prep hell, I can’t stay out too late.” Kate got up and announced she’d join him on the line home. Nicholas glanced at Caroline. “Text me if you decide you need help with the project?”

“Sure thing,” she said, adding at Elliot’s inquiring glance, “Nicholas has agreed to help me stage an abstract photography session in one of the BU labs. It’s gonna be great.”

“That’s cool,” said Elliot, wondering why Nicholas hadn’t mentioned this earlier, even in passing. Nicholas glanced over at him and sent him a faint smile, and it was weirdly evasive, which... Nicholas wasn’t  _evasive_ with Elliot. They weren’t evasive with each other.

Except that Elliot had been evading all Nicholas’ unvoiced questions about Jonah for ages, hadn’t he?

Nicholas left with Kate, without asking Elliot if he were coming, without asking Elliot if he should expect him later, and that was another thing that had somehow inexorably changed over the course of this stupid podcast. They always left together, and if for any reason they didn’t leave together, Elliot had always still known he could show up and crash on Nicholas’ couch later.

But he watched Nicholas walk out the door, chatting and laughing with Kate, and he realized that he suddenly no longer knew anything about him and Nicholas.

Maybe he never had.

“What I’m interested in,” said Jonah to Elliot, and Elliot turned back to him with a start, because somehow everyone else was gone and they were the only people still sitting at their table, “is why you’re so invested in defending Fanny and Edmund, because I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t go for someone that boring yourself.”

“Edmund’s not boring,” said Elliot defensively. “He’s kind and sweet and attentive to Fanny.”

“He’s entirely boring,” said Jonah, ushering him outside, where the sweet early summer hit Elliot in a rush. “I’m going to grab a sundae; care to join me?” and that was how Elliot found himself walking along the Charles River esplanade in the moonlight with Jonah like they were in fucking _La La Land_.

“I respect Austen’s authorial choices,” Elliot tried to explain with dignity, which just resulted in Jonah laughing for most of the walk to J.P. Licks.

“You have never respected an authorial decision in your life,” Jonah said.

“That’s not true!”

“Remember when you tried to stage ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ as an echo of ‘Take Me Out’ from  _Rent_ and wound up not-so-subtly implying that Liesl von Trapp was a sexually precocious sociopath?”

“I got an A-plus on that assignment!” Elliot said, which did nothing to quell Jonah’s laughter.

“ _Liesl,_ ” said Jonah. “ _Liesl von Trapp!_ ”

“Hey, she’s manipulative, she guilt-trips adults into vouching for her while letting her siblings terrorize the hired help,” said Elliot. “I see nothing wrong with my original interpretation.”

“This is what I mean about you,” said Jonah. “Your entire modus operandi consists of deconstructing what you’re given and usually extracting it into something sharper and more crystalline. So objectively it makes no sense for you to go to bat for Fanny and Edmund.”

“It’s not like I’m waving a flag for Edmund as the prize among Austen heroes,” said Elliot. “He’s fine and all but he’s no Mr. Knightley.”

“Mr. Knightley,” said Jonah. “Your go-to Austenian hero is Mr. Knightley.”

“I mean,” said Elliot. “Leaving aside the part where Mr. Knightley was excessively officious and spent years perving over his adolescent neighbor, he was pretty much perfect. He was the perfect mix of adoration and accountability for Emma, and he was the perfect partner for her in their zany little Star’s Hollow ensemble. Plus, Paul Rudd was completely the best version of any Austen hero onscreen, hands down.”

By now they were in line at J.P. Licks, and Jonah should have been eying the menu, but instead he turned and gazed at Elliot like he’d never seen him before.

“What?” said Elliot.

“Firstly,” said Jonah, “A discussion about the Gilmore Girls as a retelling of  _Emma_ is a thing I never knew I wanted.”

“I  _love_ them,” said Elliot emphatically, unsure whether he meant the Gilmores or Emma, but needing Jonah to know he meant it all the same.

“Second,” said Jonah, in between ordering, “I’ve always thought that we each cast ourselves in the narratives we like the most and write our lives into them, and while it makes complete sense to me that you’ve cast yourself as Emma, the idea that what you really want in a partner is a mix of adoration and accountability is... illuminating.”

Elliot felt himself go red. “I didn’t say I was identifying with Emma,” he said. “Why Emma? I could be the Jane Fairfax,” said Elliot.

Jonah snorted. “You’d never identify with the character who got sidelined in someone else’s narrative.”

“And you would?” They got their yogurts and walked outside, Jonah with a messy turtle sundae and two spoons, and Elliot with a tasteful cone of peach. “What’s your narrative, then?”

“If I tell you that,” Jonah said, blithely preoccupied with his sundae, “then you’d know what character you were in my narrative.”

Elliot snorted. “I know exactly what kind of character I’d be in your narrative. Actually, the problem with you is you don’t  _have_ your own narrative. You’re like the acerbic George Sanders type who commentates his way through everyone else’s story while you hang back and never participate. If this is  _All About Eve_ then you probably think I’m the Marilyn.”

“Do you really think I’d make you into the flighty chorus girl who’s just there to be arm candy?” Jonah asked, cutting him a sidewise glance.

“She was self-aware and she went on to become Marilyn Monroe, so I could take it as a compliment.”

“You could,” said Jonah amusedly. “I doubt that you would.”

They walked along the esplanade, eating yogurt and bickering about vintage cinema, and Elliot was keenly aware that Jonah had avoided answering his question in the most Jonah-esque way possible, and Elliot found himself wondering, really wanting to know how Jonah saw himself, and how Jonah saw Elliot, and somehow the question lingered as they walked together along the river. Their hands kept brushing as they walked along, and every time the contact made Elliot’s stomach flip, and the lights of Cambridge were glittering in the moonlight over the water, and this wasn’t a date, it couldn’t possibly be a date, but it was starting to feel a lot like a date, and Elliot found himself nervous and jittery and scrounging around for nice, safe, date-like topics.

“So what do you think of the direction?” Jonah asked jauntily.

“I—what?” Elliot asked.

“For  _Joseph_ ,” Jonah said. “You’ve nobly refrained from comment until now, but I know you’re dying to give feedback, so, out with it.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “I think it’s great.”

“Great,” Jonah repeated skeptically.

“I mean,” said Elliot. “I think Joseph is hilariously uninvested in his role and you probably need to bring the courtesans further downstage left in the act two opener because the ones in the middle are currently blocking some of the cows, and you should definitely have the brothers do a chorus line at the end of ‘One More Angel in Heaven’ because everybody loves it when boys do a chorus line, and I really stand by my original modernist idea for Pharaoh’s palace, but other than that I think it’s great.”

Jonah said, “Thank you, that’s quite helpful,” and then laughed, and laughed, and Elliot found himself staring at his profile as they walked, wondering why he’d spent so many years feeling so... intimidated, afraid, whatever, of Jonah’s opinion of him. Jonah, he suddenly realized, had  _always_ taken Elliot seriously, even when he was frustrated and fed up with him. Elliot suddenly remembered, with a pang of shame, all the times he’d joked about how Jonah would never be a  _real_ Shakespearean. He’d never taken Jonah seriously even when Jonah was putting his own ambitions and everyone else’s to shame.

“Why did you come back to Boston?” he asked abruptly. Jonah stopped laughing and turned to him as if he were surprised by the question.

“You were doing fine in New York,” Elliot said. “You wouldn’t have had to direct a school play in New York. Here you have to work three times as hard to land a fraction of the available parts. Is that really what you want?”

Jonah looked at him for a long moment. “When I first came back a few months ago, no one believed that I’d come back of my own volition,” he said. “Until that  _Globe_ profile—which was a total fluke, I assure you—everyone just assumed that I’d failed to get enough roles once I was done with repertory work.”

“The  _Globe_ made it sound like you’d returned in order to single-handedly build an active and thriving Shakespearean scene here,” said Elliot. Jonah grimaced. “I think you could,” Elliot said, surprised to realize how firmly he believed this. “But is that why you came back?”

“Partly,” Jonah said. “But mainly I came back because I missed Boston. I missed Hazel, and I missed—having a community of friends who weren’t all subtly competing against each other for parts. I missed this place, and I kept thinking of things I wanted to do here, in Boston, that I’d never have a chance to do in New York. Run workshops, maybe start a local residency program, help bring more new plays here—maybe even run my own theatre one day.”

Elliot stared at him, drinking in his bright eyes, the dreams that came through so clearly in his voice as he spoke. Jonah wasn’t like anyone else he knew, he thought. Jonah was made of determination and resilience and optimism. Jonah, against all odds, made things happen for himself.

“I could never have cast you as Hickey,” he blurted.

Jonah blinked. “What?”

Elliot took a deep breath. “It’s Nicholas who lies to himself about what he wants,” he said, the truth of it breaking over him even as he said it. “Me and Nicholas. We’re the ones who do. But not you. You’ve never lied to yourself about anything. You don’t have pipe dreams. You’d have gotten on that stage and made Eugene O’Neill into the liar, not vice versa.”

“Elliot,” Jonah breathed, and then he fell silent for a long moment, digesting this. “Do you ever think about going back?” he asked after another moment.

“Going back to what?”

Jonah was gazing at him evenly. “BU has an MFA in directing. I used to wonder why you never spoke of pursuing it further. You never thought about it?”

Elliot swallowed. “I... there didn’t seem to be much reason,” he said awkwardly, but even as he said it, he realized how strange that must sound. He’d won an  _award_ for directing, of course it would be natural for him to want to pursue it.

Maybe it was a little easier to admit in hindsight that Jonah had been right: Elliot had seen directing  _The Iceman Cometh_ as his little adventure with Nicholas, a pre-med-school gift to him, if he were being honest. And once it was over—once Nicholas had focused completely on med school—there didn’t seem to be any reason to keep thinking about theatre when Elliot had had more important things to do.

“Besides,” he added, wondering why Jonah always seemed to have him completely second-guessing all his life choices with just a word or two. “I’m good at what I do and I get paid for it. That makes me a cut above the average millennial stereotype, so I’ll take it.” He glanced up at Jonah and suddenly remembered Jonah’s voice that night at Deep Ellum, telling him that he could be unstoppable. “I know it’s just social media,” he said, a little feebly. “It’s nothing like going to med school or being a successful actor, but —”

“Elliot,” Jonah said. “You don’t have to defend anything to me. It’s obvious you’re excellent at your job, and you seem to enjoy it.” He looked down and probably took in the furrow of Elliot’s forehead. “Don’t you?”

Elliot thought about it. Ordinarily he’d say something witty and confident and dodge the question, but just now he didn’t feel like bothering; that tactic never worked with Jonah anyway.  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s something to do. I’m not saving the world, but I’d be terrible at that anyway.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Jonah mildly, and then he paused because they’d neared the statue of Arthur Fiedler’s bulbous head, and he was clearly contemplating walking over. Elliot definitely didn’t think about how this was starting to resemble one of those unexpectedly  _good_ first dates that kept getting extended because no one wanted to go home just yet, because as previously established, this definitely wasn’t a date, and those kind of dates never actually happened to Elliot anyway, so that probably wasn’t what this was.

Still, partly to settle his nerves, he seized upon the distraction afforded by Arthur Fiedler’s head and dragged Jonah over to it across the lawn, and it was only when they reached it that he realized he’d grabbed Jonah’s hand and pulled him along without a thought, and he was about to let go in alarm, except that Jonah was bidding an extravagant good evening to Arthur Fiedler’s head like nothing out of the ordinary had just happened, and instead of letting go he  _laced their fingers together_ , and the touch was overwhelming, and when Jonah pointed out something across the water he gestured with the hand holding Elliot’s own, but he still didn't let go _,_ and Elliot kept having to remember not to stare at their hands linked together, and not to stare at Jonah to see what he thought of their hands linked together, with the result that he kept growing steadily more and more flustered, and had to channel his confusion into complaining vociferously to Arthur Fiedler’s head about the current state of the Boston Pops.

He was in the middle of a rant about why the Pops should just ditch Keith Lockhart for someone like Hans Zimmer already, since that was clearly the direction in which it was headed, and honestly they might as well go ahead and trade out the violin section for a few synthesizers to help prepare for the New Zimmer Order, when he felt Jonah watching him. He turned and saw Jonah staring at him, his eyes amused and bright.

“Well,” Elliot muttered, a little self-consciously, “digital killed the symphonic pop star.”

“I don’t even know how you know that Hans Zimmer was in that music video in order to make that reference, or how I came to know it in order to get that reference, but well done to us both,” said Jonah blandly, and Elliot preened, pleased he’d gotten it, and Jonah laughed, an odd, off-kilter sound. He tugged Elliot over to a nearby bench and sat down, and traced his thumb over the curve of Elliot’s wrist, still keeping their hands linked, and Elliot tried to remember how humans normally breathed.

“Do you remember that trip to Walden we took all those years ago?” Jonah asked. “The one you wanted to name Nicholas Waldo Emerson after?” Elliot nodded. “The main thing I remember about that day,” Jonah said, “was that you brought a  _pineapple_ with you. And you carried that pineapple for a mile and a half through the woods and you kept up a running conversation with it the entire time,  _in French_.”

“You remember that?” Jonah gave him a look that was just short of an eyeroll implying that of  _course_ he remembered that. Elliot barely remembered that. He remembered the pineapple, of course, because he’d gotten it on a whim, and he remembered the heady excitement of that day, the fun of getting them all together when they were all still largely getting to know one another. Mostly what he remembered was Nicholas running around in his ridiculous blazer, being ridiculous, and silly, and fun. His impression of Jonah from that day was that he was, per usual, judging Elliot from afar.

It dawned on him that possibly they could do a similar survey of every moment he and Jonah had shared together from college and discover they’d wound up with completely different impressions from start to finish.

“At the time,” Jonah said, “I kept thinking, as I watched you, was that here was someone who would either instantly seduce or instantly alienate everyone around him.”

“So you  _were_ judging me from afar,” said Elliot. “I knew it.”

Jonah’s smile grew, and it was soft and fond, and Elliot didn’t understand how he could sit there and  _say_ these things and smile at Elliot and make Elliot want to fall into that smile and, and feel things, and it was infuriating and dizzying, and Jonah was  _still holding his hand._  

“I thought that I was lucky that I could see through you,” Jonah said. “I thought, maybe we’re just enough alike, the two of us, that I won’t ever have to worry which side of the Elliot divide I come down on.”

The trees on the esplanade lawn were throwing long, dramatic shadows across the grass, and Jonah’s outline seemed to blur at the edges in the moonlight. They felt nearer than they’d been just moments before. Elliot’s heartbeat sped up.

“And yet,” Jonah continued, his voice darkening, “all these years later, I’m still wondering where I ended up with you.”

Elliot stared at him. He opened his mouth and started to reply, and then he froze with his heart in his throat, because the appalling reply that had forced its way into his brain was:

 _We could find out_.

He felt a rush of confusion and guilt and yearning and bit his lip, because if he didn’t, he would say it out loud, and if he said it, he wasn’t sure what it would mean, or how it would change things, and the thought was heady and terrifying, and Elliot was sure Jonah could read all of this in his face, because Jonah’s eyes were warm and fixed on him, and Elliot was honestly going to try breathing again any moment, really.

“Do you remember what I asked you that day?” Jonah asked. “That day in the Black Box.”

“You asked me if I knew what I wanted from you,” Elliot breathed. He’d thought about that moment plenty of times since, even though he’d tried not to. “And I didn’t answer.” He kept biting his lip, because if he didn’t keep biting his lip he would ask the question he couldn’t ask:  _What answer would have gotten you to stay?_

Only there was no right answer. Jonah had  _broken his lease_ to leave them—to leave Elliot. And Elliot...

“I never wanted you to go away,” he blurted. “I know that sounds... I mean. I know I was a complete asshole when we lived together.”

“I wonder if you know why,” Jonah said. He looked down at their joined hands, and said, as if he were choosing his words carefully, “I think things were tense between us back then  _because_ you didn’t know what you wanted from me.” Elliot was still processing what Jonah meant by that when Jonah seemed to collect himself. He looked back up at Elliot’s face, and his expression was suddenly intense, earnest. “While I—I knew exactly what I wanted from you.”

All the breaths Elliot had been forgetting to take suddenly caught up with him, and he inhaled sharply. “Jonah,” he gasped, and then he sat still, shocked, as the implications of what Jonah was saying finally washed over him.

And then Jonah whispered, “Elliot,” and touched Elliot's face, and Elliot felt all his atoms rearrange themselves at once.

It was a simple touch, or it should have been, but Jonah thumbed Elliot’s cheek, and Elliot felt completely, utterly undone. Jonah’s hand was warm and the touch was intimate and tender and unbearably gentle, and it was somehow the most intense thing Elliot had ever felt, and he could barely move, could barely understand what was happening to him.

“I left,” said Jonah, almost a whisper, “I moved out, because I knew I couldn’t have what I wanted, because you weren’t ready to admit you wanted it, too. I wasn’t sure if you ever would be.”

Elliot stared up at him, half a dozen confusing conversations and scenes from all their years together in college colliding in his brain, all suddenly imbued with new meaning and significance, along with a thousand jittery accidental touches and moments of tension and, hell, Jonah didn’t even  _know_ about the angry drunk reblogs from years past on Elliot’s secret Tumblr of a sea of men with high cheekbones and dramatic Victorian looks—and those were just the moments Elliot could remember while trying not to  _literally die_ because Jonah’s fingertips were skating over his cheek.

Elliot had spent years treating Jonah like, like a slutty condescending jerk sitting in judgment over Elliot and all Elliot’s life choices, and the whole time Jonah had  _wanted him_ , had wanted him like  _this_ , like walks in the moonlight and park bench confessions and soft touches, and—and all that confusion and hostility and tension Elliot had felt for him suddenly seemed like such a fool’s game, such a silly, stupid waste of time, when he could have had this, he could have had  _Jonah_ , his voice and his touches and his sly shrewd looks and his judgment that wasn’t judgment at all, because he wanted Elliot, he  _wanted_ Elliot, and Elliot—Elliot had always,  _always wanted Jonah_.

Jonah was looking at him like, like none of it, the lease-breaking, the moving, the avoidance, the thirty months spent apart—like none of that had done either of them any good at all. And it  _hadn’t_ , because now he was touching Elliot, now Elliot knew what his touch felt like and he would never be able to erase it from his skin, and Jonah had  _known_ , Jonah had practically  _told Elliot_ that Elliot wanted him, too, that day in the Black Box, in his cryptically confrontational Jonah-y way. And Elliot hadn’t gotten it. Elliot hadn’t realized—Elliot hadn’t understood anything, and now it seemed so, so blindingly unbelievably obvious, what this feeling was.

It was suddenly all too, too much. Elliot’s heart was pounding in his chest, his stomach doing slow somersaults. He tried to swallow and found his throat so dry he had to try all over again. He could barely meet Jonah’s eyes and he could barely stand to look away. “You’re trembling,” Jonah said, sounding a little awed, thumbing the corner of Elliot’s eyelashes.

“I’m,” said Elliot, shakily, “I’m trying not to kiss your palm like I’m the helpless virgin in some sort of Hays Code love scene.”

Jonah laughed brokenly and bent close to him and said, “Elliot,” in a soft, wrecked voice. He cupped Elliot’s face between both of his hands, and Elliot  _vibrated_ at the touch. He shivered and lifted his own hand to trail his fingers over Jonah’s temple, and somehow that simple bit of contact unloosed something inside of him; he tilted Jonah’s head down and their noses were brushing together and it was close and intimate and raw, and he wanted this  _so much_ , he wanted to keep touching Jonah just like this, and the force of it was staggering.

Jonah deliberately brushed his nose against Elliot’s again, and it was intoxicating and  _perfect_ , and just when Elliot thought he probably  _was_ about to kiss Jonah’s palm like the helpless virgin in some sort of Hays Code love scene, Jonah asked, “You want to know the narrative I’m writing myself into?”

Elliot nodded helplessly, and Jonah murmured, “ _Persuasion_ ,” and kissed him.

Jonah kissed him like he was the sun and Jonah was freezing, like kissing Elliot was something vital, like he’d been putting it off for so long he’d become desperate for it, and Elliot went completely weak-limbed and sank against Jonah as he kissed back, gasping against his mouth as Jonah stole all the air from his lungs, stole  _everything_.

Jonah kept Elliot’s face cupped in his hands, and Elliot couldn’t stop touching him, his cheeks, his temples, his lips. He curled his fingers in the soft hair at the base of Jonah’s neck and pressed closer, opening up for him until his lips were vibrating and his head was spinning and he felt like he no longer had control of his own motor functions.

Which, of course, was when Jonah broke away and said, voice shaking, “But I can’t, not while you’re still—still so—”

He broke off as if he couldn’t bear to continue, and Elliot, heart in his throat, said, “Please, I want you to,” and drew him down for another deep kiss, desperate to feel again the way Jonah wrapped him up, the way his lips skated over Elliot’s throat like he couldn’t help but touch him. Jonah kissed him like he’d been dying to do it, couldn’t stop touching him, wanted to brand him with the heat of his fingers, and Elliot no longer knew why he’d been denying himself this all this time.

“You’re still trembling,” Jonah said, lips against Elliot’s throat, and it was delicious agony that Jonah’s mouth was on his skin and simultaneously not where Elliot needed it to be, which was kissing him into oblivion.

“I don’t,” he tried to explain, though it came out more like a gasp. “It’s not normally, I’m not—” and then he gave up, because this was one of the things Jonah knew about him, that he usually hated being touched, hated the work of getting turned on, found everything about foreplay something of a chore.

But this—Jonah’s hands on his skin set all his nerve endings on fire; he felt lit inside and out, unable to help any of his reactions, and all of his reactions were intense and overwhelming and Jonah had barely even  _touched_ him. They couldn’t stop touching one another’s faces, and Elliot had never known how powerful that kind of contact could be, but now he knew and he couldn’t help kissing Jonah again, because it was easier, so much easier, than trying to articulate the heady confusion and desire clouding his brain.

“Please,” he heard himself whisper again against Jonah’s mouth. “I didn’t know, I didn’t want to know this, it’s too  _much_ , I can’t,  _Jonah._ ”

And Jonah said, “Shh,” and, “I know,” and kissed his forehead and his temple and the space below Elliot’s ear. He murmured, “You are so... _Elliot_ ,” and then apparently gave up trying to articulate what Elliot’s Elliotness was and kissed him again, and Elliot found himself pressed against the edge of the bench with Jonah’s fingertips stroking his jawline and his chin and his tongue teasing Elliot until his lips were buzzing, and he never, ever wanted Jonah to stop kissing him.

“You’re exquisite,” Jonah breathed, drawing back, which was the opposite of continuing to kiss him. Elliot heard himself make a kind of desperate little noise of indignation which at any other time he would have found mortifying, but at the moment he was too focused on missing the taste of Jonah’s lips, the too-sweet taste of caramel and hazelnut that clung to him. Jonah skated his lips over Elliot’s forehead and looked down at him like he was some sort of ghost he couldn’t believe was actually in his arms. “You were always going to be my undoing,” he said hoarsely. “I think I always have known.”

“It doesn’t have to be an undoing,” Elliot said, aware that he sounded completely ruined. “It can be the start of something.”

“Can it?” Jonah looked at him, and Elliot wondered how he’d managed to blind himself all this time to the way that steady scrutiny had always made him feel—how he’d managed to convince himself he was just merely annoyed and confused by it instead of helplessly pinned beneath the force of it.

“I know, Elliot,” said Jonah. “I know what happens when I get between you and Nicholas”—and the shock of hearing Nicholas’s name on Jonah’s lips, lips that had just been  _kissing_ him, made the blow of the words land even more heavily. “It always ends badly.”

“It doesn’t,” said Elliot, wondering how it was possible to feel even more confused than he had so far this night. “It doesn’t always end badly.”

Jonah gave him a wry, rueful smile. “Maybe it just always ends badly for me, then.” He kissed Elliot again, and Elliot was almost too dizzy by the time he released him to comprehend what Jonah was murmuring against his lips at first.

“Wait,” he said. “Jonah, I don’t—Nicholas and I aren’t in a relationship.”

“Yes,” Jonah said, putting some distance between them at last, “you are. You’re practically living together. Whatever you want to call it—either talk to him and work out some arrangement, or if you decide you want to pursue this, then come to me when it’s finally over between you. I’m not doing this until then.”

“This,” Elliot breathed. “What  _is_ this?”

“A terrible idea, probably,” said Jonah, and then they were kissing again, and Elliot couldn’t stop reaching for him, couldn’t stop murmuring Jonah’s name and tracing Jonah’s lips with his fingers, kissing his mouth and his sharp jawline and the shell of his ear, couldn’t stop  _wanting_ him, until finally Jonah pulled back with a broken, “I have to go,” and kissed him one final time, fleeting and soft, before insisting on walking him back to the street to grab their Lyfts—regrettably separate this time.

They stood on the sidewalk as they were waiting, trying and failing not to cling to each other. Jonah pressed his lips against Elliot’s forehead, and their noses brushed again, and Elliot murmured faintly while they breathed each other in, “I honestly didn’t  _know_ , Jonah.”

Jonah pulled back to gaze at him and then impulsively took Elliot’s hand again. “I know,” he said. “You maddening, ridiculous creature.” And he raised Elliot’s hand to his lips, then poured himself into the waiting car and vanished into the night like some kind of sleek noir antihero, leaving Elliot standing alone on the sidewalk feeling like a princess transformed once more into a pumpkin.

“Fuck,” said Elliot to no one in particular when he got into his car.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“I,” said Elliot, “I have no idea.”

The driver looked at him, expectant.

Elliot said, “Fuck,” feelingly again, and gave him Nicholas’s address.

“D’you have a nice night?” Nicholas said, yawning, reaching up to ruffle Elliot’s hair in passing as he handed him the warm fuzzy blanket he always kept folded and ready behind the couch just for Elliot.

Elliot stared at him, shocked Nicholas couldn’t magically instantly look at him and tell from his kiss-swollen, plum-red lips, the mussed look of him, the guilt written all over his face. Or maybe Nicholas could tell and just didn’t care.

 _Jonah kissed me_ , he didn’t say.  _Jonah devoured me from the inside out._ _Jonah told me I had to tell you or risk losing whatever chance I never knew I had with him. We need to talk about us. And Jonah. But mostly us._

“Yeah,” he said finally, settling down on Nicholas’s couch, which suddenly felt like a weird foreign object. What was he even  _doing_ here? Why didn’t he have his own place? “It was fine.”

“Good,” said Nicholas, yawning again as he padded into the bedroom. “G’night.”

“Rowrm,” said Ian Purrtis disapprovingly, but he curled up on Elliot’s stomach anyway as Elliot proceeded to lie awake for the rest of the night.

 _I miss you_ , he texted Jonah sometime after three, when he finally gave up and rolled over and dumped Ian Purrtis on the floor in order to reach for his phone.

 _Go to sleep, you silly chit_ , was Jonah’s response a few seconds later.

Elliot grinned idiotically at his phone.

 _You are really rocking that Heyer-speak_ , he responded.

 _Are you with Nicholas?_ Jonah replied.

Ian Purrtis sent Elliot an unimpressed look that Elliot suspected probably matched the one on Jonah’s face at the moment.

_I’m with Nicholas’ couch, I guess._

_Hmm_ , Jonah replied, because Jonah was the sort of ridiculous person who sent audible sounds in text messages, and Elliot couldn’t stop smiling, and this was all  _awful_.  Jonah continued,  _If I were a proper Heyer hero, I would say something here about not making me repeat myself_.

 _I’ll talk to him_ , said Elliot.  _Can’t I just miss you until then?_

 _Talk to him_ , Jonah replied.  _Talk to him SOON_.

Elliot grinned.  _Go to sleep, you insufferable Corinthian_ , he answered, barely refraining from adding a winky emoji, because he felt giddy and delighted and flirty and everything was terrible.

He flopped over on his back on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Jonah was awake at 3 am, thinking of him, too. Jonah missed him. Elliot was  _lying on Nicholas’s couch missing Jonah_.

“What am I even  _doing_?” he wondered aloud.

“Mrow,” said Ian Purrtis.


	2. Chapter 2

“So,” said Nicholas the next morning over coffee and toast. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, just like every morning, watching Elliot stumble around the room bumping into things like someone who’d only caught a few short snatches of sleep in between thinking about his ridiculous love life.  “You seem... distracted.”

It was a Wednesday, and normally Wednesdays were Elliot’s favorite because Nicholas would make breakfast and Elliot would steal sections of his newspaper and tease him over the morning crossword and then they’d head into Nicholas’s second bedroom which was really Elliot’s office and Nicholas would distract him from getting work done while jostling for space at the desk that was normally Elliot’s desk, as Ian Purrtis butted his head against each of their ankles and purred at them, and Elliot would nudge his elbow and Nicholas would ruffle his hair and things would just be happy and simple and nice and easy, because that was just how they were.

But now Elliot kept darting looks at Nicholas (in between darting looks at his phone and wondering how soon he could get away with texting Jonah again) and trying to think of something to say that wasn’t _are we in a relationship because I thought we were but now I’m not sure and I’m not even sure if we want to be_ , and suddenly nothing felt easy at all.

“Distracted?” Elliot tried to shrug nonchalantly and accidentally sloshed the coffee he’d been pouring instead.  

Nicholas tilted his head and gave Elliot one of his affectionate Elliot looks. “Yeah, kind of. In a good way.”

Elliot fumbled for a paper towel. “I’m always distracted.”

“Yeah, but this is... happy distracted,” Nicholas said. “You know.”

Elliot chanced another glance at him. Nicholas’s legs were crossed in front of him, and his body language was open, deliberately easy. It was the kind of studied Nicholas pose that meant he was actually being super careful, feeling things out.

“Are you, are you getting at something?” Elliot asked him. He was going to do it; any moment now he was going to open his mouth and say, ‘Nicholas, I need to talk to you,’ and he even got as far as opening his mouth—

—Except if he tried to ask Nicholas about this and it turned out that everything had been in his head, that Nicholas had never wanted him, that all these years of togetherness and low-level flirting and staving off Nicholas’s drunk come-ons hoping for the real thing to manifest one day had been a giant lie, where would that leave him? Where would that leave the two of them?

God, what if Nicholas _laughed_ at him? No, Nicholas would never laugh at him. But Nicholas might look awkward and uncomfortable and, god forbid, _pitying_ , and suggest that maybe they should spend some time apart; and then everything would change, they might never be the same again, and Elliot couldn’t, he _couldn’t_.

“No,” Nicholas said, still in that careful mode. “Nothing.”

Elliot took a sip of his coffee, to which he’d managed to add double the cream and sugar in the midst of all this preoccupation. It was burning hot and ridiculously sweet and he winced at it, and Nicholas’s expression relaxed in amusement.

“I mean,” said Elliot, relieved at the sudden mood shift and scrounging around for a topic change to match. “There’s always something happening. Like the party and all.” In truth, he’d forgotten about the party until just that second. “Hazel wants me to plan it.”

“Yeah but you can do that in your sleep,” said Nicholas. “Actually, I was thinking we should do a live podcast reading for the fans. Like we can act out the last episode for them.”

“You and Jonah can... act out the last episode,” Elliot echoed, thinking of the stage directions for that week’s episode, and the passionate kiss Elliot definitely wasn’t going to be in the studio to watch. It was bad enough just _hearing_ it.

Nicholas said, “Yeah,” and then, “Would that be a problem?”

“No,” Elliot said, too quickly. “Why would it be? For me? I mean. A problem?”

“You tell me,” said Nicholas, blinking. And then he said, suddenly earnest, “Elliot.”

Elliot froze all over.

“I think,” said Nicholas, “I think things have been kind of weird between us lately. You know. A lot’s been happening.”

“What do you think is happening?” Elliot blurted.

Nicholas double-taked.

“No, really,” Elliot pressed. “What do you think is happening?”

“I,” said Nicholas, and then he took a long drink of his coffee and set it down again and said, “you know what, just forget it.”

“Forget it.”

“Yeah,” said Nicholas. “Let’s just...” he waved his hand.

“Sure,” said Elliot, wondering what the hell was going on. “Fine.”

“I’m gonna tell Hazel about my idea for the podcast reading,” Nicholas said, digging out his phone.

“Great,” said Elliot. “That’s great. It’s a great idea. Totally fine with me.”

“Great,” said Nicholas. He swallowed. Elliot took a drink of his coffee. Nicholas went into the living room to talk to Hazel, and Elliot stood awkwardly in the kitchen staring at Ian Purrtis.

It was technically after breakfast, so he should be going into his office which was actually Nicholas’s second bedroom to start work, like he did every other day. But the idea of him just commandeering Nicholas’s space and going to work like normal, given everything, felt strange and off-kilter. But where was he going to go otherwise? Into the _office_?

His phone buzzed, and he looked down to see a single _?_ from Jonah. He had no idea how to respond, and Nicholas was still on the phone with Hazel, so instead he wandered into the study and stood looking around. He’d basically moved into this room; his dress shirts and several pairs of pants were all hanging in a group in the closet, and the desk was covered in stuff that was his—his laptop, his tablet, pens, notebooks, even his Wacom. He could take all this stuff back to the guest apartment over his parents’ house, but there wasn’t really a study and it was mostly all crowded with stuff from his high school years that his mom refused to throw away because she was sentimental and wanted to keep his old things around forever, and it certainly wasn’t the best place to be in case he had to some kind of video Slack or something.

Shit, he thought. Maybe he really did need his own space.

“Oh, this reminds me,” said Nicholas, joining him suddenly. “I actually was going to ask if you could find somewhere else to crash for the week.”

“What?” Elliot turned to him, startled.

“It’s exam crunch time and I’m having my study group over for the next few nights anyway,” said Nicholas. “I know you’ll want to be doing your own thing, and I know normally you help me study and things, and that’s always been amazing, seriously. But this time is different. I really need to focus and not have any distractions. So would you mind? Just for a few days til exams are over?”

Objectively, Elliot thought, it was probably a great idea. He’d just been thinking he needed to clear out. But thinking it himself and having Nicholas _tell_ him to go were... different.

He swallowed. “Sure, dude,” he said, wincing internally at how bro-y and stilted that sounded. “No problem.”

“It’s just for a little while,” said Nicholas again.

“It’s fine,” said Elliot, moving to the desk to get his stuff. “Seriously, I was actually just thinking I needed to grab my laptop and get out of your hair for a couple of days.” He grabbed randomly at some headphones and USB chargers and hoped they were the right ones. “I’ve actually got a big hashtag campaign coming up anyway so I’ll be working a lot at night, so this is good timing.” That was mostly a lie, and Nicholas knew enough about Elliot’s job he could probably have figured that out if he’d considered it, but Nicholas just smiled and leaned against the doorframe.

“See, this works out great,” he said. “And after both of our crunch weeks are over I’ll take you out to celebrate.”

“Yeah,” said Elliot, raiding his closet and returning with his arms now full of wires and tech stuff and suits.  He looked down and thought regretfully that he should have cuddled Ian Purrtis first. “Sounds good.”

Nicholas smiled at him, and Elliot’s stomach twisted unhappily. “Hey, don’t forget to eat lunch,” he said, unnecessarily, wondering who would send Nicholas off to med school on his exam days with a perfectly plated bento box full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pear salads. “And drink plenty of vitamin C.”

Nicholas’ smile grew. “Yeah, of course, mom,” he said, and after that there was nothing for Elliot to do but leave.

So Elliot left.

He went to a nearby coffee shop with wifi and ordered so much espresso the barista side-eyed him. Then he opened his laptop, checked in to work, and Skyped Jane.

“Elliot, I can’t Skype right now, I’m about to head into work, what is it,” said Jane.

“Sorry,” Elliot blurted, and then sat there, not adding, _it’s just that I made out with Jonah and he told me to talk to Nicholas to find out if I’m actually in a real relationship with him before we can make out again and I really, really want to make out with him again but I can’t because I’m in a not-relationship with Nicholas, or at least I thought I was until Nicholas kicked me out of his apartment because of exam week, which he’s never done before, and I need you to come home and fix my life_.

Jane said, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “Yeah, absolutely, I just wanted to say hi. Go conquer Google.”

Jane grinned at him. “Miss you,” she said, and blew him a kiss before signing off.

This coffeeshop was playing _Kings of Leon_. Everything was awful.

Elliot dug out his phone again and stared at the single _?_ from Jonah.

 _What’s your schedule like today?_  Elliot texted.

 _I’m in rehearsals through the evening_ , Jonah responded. _Tonight?_

Elliot looked at the text like it was some kind of mystic tome holding the key to the future. Carefully, he crafted a response:

_I talked to him. Can I crash at your place tonight?_

After a delay long enough to make Elliot nervous, Jonah responded, _We both know if you come to my apartment tonight it won’t be to sleep on my couch._

Elliot shivered.

 _Like I said_ , he sent back.

Jonah replied with his address.

  
  
  


When Jonah opened the door to his apartment that night, Elliot couldn’t hold back a peal of nervous laughter. Jonah was wearing the smoking jacket. He stood there, looking ridiculously fucking hot, and Elliot stood on the threshold, suddenly breathless, until Jonah said, “Come in before I eat you alive right there in the hallway,” and pulled him inside and pushed him up against the door.

He tilted Elliot’s chin up with his long fingers and kissed him, hungry and wanton, one hand slipping beneath the folds of Elliot’s disheveled dress shirt to palm his skin. Elliot tugged Jonah’s jacket from his shoulders and carded his fingers through Jonah’s hair, deepening the kiss as Jonah moved against him. He had a sudden vision of what they must look like, bodies grinding together like this, and the thought jolted him out of the kiss with a gasp.

“If this is too fast,” Jonah murmured, tilting Elliot’s chin up to kiss his way over Elliot’s jawline. “we can go slower. It’ll be agonizing, but I can try.”

Elliot shuddered against him. “I have been going slow for _years_ ,” he muttered. “This, right now—this is all I want.” Jonah undid the remaining buttons of Elliot’s shirt and sank his mouth over Elliot’s collarbone, tonguing his way over the skin there before answering.

“I’ve wanted you for _so long_ ,” Jonah whispered finally, mouth against his throat, and Elliot’s stomach did a bunch of crazy somersaults and loop-de-loops. “I wanted you right from the moment you showed up with that stupid pineapple.” He leaned up and bit the shell of Elliot’s ear, then did it again when he gasped. “And you,” he said, punctuating each statement with an upward roll of his hips that made Elliot’s hard-on ache for more friction, “you had no idea what you did to me. You have no idea all the things I want to do to you.”

Elliot arched against him. “I’m getting a pretty good idea right now.”

Jonah pulled back and raked his eyes over Elliot. “This is just a preview,” he said, “I promise you,” and then they were kissing again, and Elliot’s shirt slipped completely off his shoulders. Jonah’s kisses were hot, and every one of them seemed to ignite tiny fires beneath Elliot’s skin. His touches were hot, too, slow and steady and completely overwhelming. Elliot had no _idea_ why all Jonah had to do to turn him into a trembling heap of arousal was just _touch him_ , but he seemed to be as overwhelmed by the transformation as Elliot was; he couldn’t seem to stop running his hands over Elliot’s face, his arms, his chest, and it was incredible and intoxicating and Elliot was going to come before he even properly set foot in Jonah’s apartment.

Elliot arched and squirmed and made out with Jonah against Jonah’s apartment door, and then against his musical theatre bookshelf, which had two rows devoted exclusively to Sondheim, and another whole row just devoted to Ethan Mordden’s chronological history of Broadway, which was so hot that Elliot dropped to his knees and pulled open Jonah’s fly on the spot.

“You really are making up for lost time,” said Jonah, sounding impressed, and Elliot, presented with Jonah’s cock, tried to convey with his lips and his tongue that he was even more impressed, and then, _finally_ , Jonah got him naked and took him to bed, and Elliot pulled Jonah down against him and raked his nails over Jonah’s skin and stretched out beneath him, and Jonah pressed him into the pillows and whispered things against the hollow of his throat, and kissed him, and touched him, and came inside of him, over and over.

  


In the morning Elliot’s phone angrily buzzed him awake, and he fumbled for it as he came to consciousness in a blurry haze of skin-sated arousal and contentment. It took a while because he had no idea where he’d flung his pants, and because Jonah was also waking up which meant he was casually palming Elliot’s ass as Elliot groped around on the floor for his trousers.

Eventually he worked out that the buzzing noises were confused Slack notifications from one of his clients wondering where he was.

“Fuck,” said Elliot. He rolled over and sat up and thumbed open the app. Jonah sat up behind him and began kissing his way down Elliot’s shoulder blade.

“Work?” Jonah asked.

“I just have to,” Elliot said, trying to reply to Slack messages while also arching his neck to give Jonah better access to his throat, “send some tweets.”

Jonah snorted. “Your dedication to your work ethic is admirable. But then I got a taste of that last night.”

Elliot turned and straddled Jonah’s lap, angling for closeness. “Turns out I’m very dedicated to that kind of work,” he said, running his fingers through Jonah’s hair.

Jonah pulled Elliot’s body against him, then pressed a kiss against Elliot’s wrist. “Am I keeping you from your job, though?”

Elliot squirmed against him. “I definitely don’t need to do any kind of work that requires leaving this bed.”

“I didn’t peg you as the type to linger in the morning,” Jonah murmured. He brushed their noses together, and Elliot squirmed some more, because Elliot fucking _loved_ when he did that. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I didn’t peg you as the type to do repeats,” Elliot said. He smiled, ruefully recalling all the times he’d side-eyed Jonah’s tendency to take different men to bed, realizing now that all along he’d been jealous that none of those men were him. “Not that I’m complaining.”

Jonah’s smile was sharp, mirroring his own. “You hungry?” he said. “I make very fluffy pancakes.”

“Do the pancakes come with you fucking me?” Elliot asked, grinding against him.

“There can be pancakes,” Jonah said, a little breathlessly. He leaned down and nipped Elliot’s chin. “And not pancakes.”

“I like your not pancakes,” Elliot said. He reached down and stroked Jonah’s cock.

Jonah bit back a moan. “You can have both,” he said. He cupped Elliot’s ass with both hands and pulled Elliot’s cheeks down against his cock, grinning when Elliot’s breath stuttered at the contact. “You can, in fact, have all you want.”

“Kiss me,” Elliot heard himself say, and then did it for him, deep and urgent, morning breath be damned. Jonah shuddered against him and stroked his long hands over Elliot’s chest and down his spine, and broke the kiss only to mutter against his throat that Elliot was beautiful when he was like this.

“Like what?” Elliot said, flushing.

Jonah’s eyes were dark. “Fucked-out. Touch-starved.”

Elliot shivered. “So touch me,” he said. “Touch me everywhere you want.” And Jonah bore him down to the bed and did as asked.

  


Jonah eventually extricated himself from Elliot long enough to make strawberry pancakes while Elliot mostly distracted him by biting his shoulder, and his hipbones, and his elbows, and anywhere else that seemed available. Jonah retaliated by laying Elliot out on the narrow kitchen island and sucking him off, and Elliot, subsequently in mid-flail, caught his hand on the powdered sugar and dumped it mostly on himself and the floor, which meant that he had his umpteenth orgasm that morning in the middle of Jonah’s kitchen while Jonah was kissing sugar from his forehead.

And then finally, after they’d cleaned up and eaten pancakes and done the dishes and showered and traded more orgasms, and Elliot had tugged on one of the suits he’d nabbed from Nicholas’s closet the previous morning and sent some more tweets, Jonah finished straightening his tie and said: “Do I need to ask where things stand between you and Nicholas?”

Elliot swallowed. “No, not really,” he said, and Jonah gave him one of those unimpressed looks he seemed to trot out just for Elliot.

“There is no me and Nicholas,” Elliot said. “I’m liking the sound of me and you, though.”

“Did you tell him about us?” Jonah asked.

Elliot abruptly looked away from him, all the pain and confusion from the previous weeks returning full force. Probably Nicholas would be perfectly happy for him. Probably Nicholas already thought something was happening between them. Probably Elliot could tell Nicholas about Jonah and it would be fine.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Not yet.”

Jonah reached out and took his hand, and then, oddly, kissed it.

“There’s always going to be a you and Nicholas,” he said simply. “He’s your best friend, and you love each other.”

Elliot looked up at him, trying to read his face. Jonah didn’t look jealous or angry or worried. He just looked... like someone who wanted Elliot to be happy. Elliot wondered if it was that simple.

“But we don’t have to tell anyone right away, if you don’t want,” Jonah added.

“That’s... that’s probably... good?” Elliot winced at how confused he sounded.

Jonah laced his fingers through Elliot’s. “I know you think I don’t do serious relationships,” he said. “But I want us to be together.”

Elliot sent him a helpless look, wondering for the umpteenth time how Jonah could just _say_ things like this, calmly and casually, like actually talking about feelings and having adult conversations about relationships wasn’t all absolutely _petrifying_.

“As much as you’re comfortable with,” Jonah added.

“I,” said Elliot. He took a deep breath and forced himself to man up. “I want that, too.”

“Are you sure?” said Jonah. “Absolutely sure?”

Elliot blinked up at him. “No,” he said honestly. “That’s why I think it’s probably the right thing.”

“You are going to _end me_ ,” said Jonah, drawing him in.

“If we do this,” Jonah said moments or hours later when he broke their kiss, sounding as if he’d been drugged, “I want us to do this properly. I want to take you on ridiculous dates and behave like a gentlemen on them and _then_ drag you back to my bed.”

Elliot hummed against Jonah’s skin, feeling just as strung out as Jonah sounded. “There can be dates. I like dates.”

Jonah raised an eyebrow. “ _Do_ you? Do you like dates?”

“I like...” Elliot paused. He had always liked dates for the ambiance or whatever. He actually couldn’t remember any date he’d ever had except in details like whether or not the restaurants had served German wine or had brancusi as the special or whether Nicholas would have been impressed by the craft beer on tap. He made a face. “I _want_ to like dates,” he said. “I liked Tuesday night.”

Jonah’s eyes widened slightly, and he drew his hand over Elliot’s cheek. “You have been going on artfully arranged dates and having sex in artfully arranged positions, all without a shred of emotion, haven't you,” he said, thumbing Elliot’s cheekbone.

“I don’t,” Elliot started to say, and then halted. He thought back over all the mediocre one-night stands he’d allowed himself here and there across the years, the way he’d channeled even his celebrity crushes into aesthetic appreciation, the infrequent dates he’d been on—all half-assed attempts at intimacy he’d made without any real conviction, because he typically felt no pull to be with anyone, and because he’d told himself all along that he’d just, one day, surely, open up when he and Nicholas finally got their shit together.

He looked at Jonah, unsure how to say any of that. But Jonah just looked back at him, and Elliot remembered: Jonah had always seen through him. And Jonah didn’t expect him to say anything at all.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Jonah said. “We can try dates. And if we don’t like dates—” he brushed a kiss against Elliot’s mouth. “We can always cut them short.”

“That sounds fair,” Elliot murmured into his kiss. “That sounds amazing.” He kissed Jonah’s nose, mesmerized by the way Jonah’s eyelashes fluttered when he did. “I want to go on extravagant dates that last hours because no one wants to leave, and short dates that get cut off because we have better things to do, and I want you to press me into corners and kiss me when no one’s looking, and I want to sit next to you when we’re all hanging out at Deep Ellum and hold hands under the table and say coded things that drive you up the wall and be close to you. Can we do all that?”

Jonah stared at him and then said, “Elliot,” in a choked voice, a startled, helpless sound that made Elliot’s nerve endings go all fizzy again, and then they were kissing again, and Jonah was cupping Elliot’s face in his hands and murmuring Elliot’s name against Elliot’s lips, and Elliot closed his eyes and tried to hold on to the warm glow of it—to the sensation of being completely, unequivocally wanted and adored.

  
  


They didn’t go on dates.

A week went by in a dreamy, slick haze of bodies and tongues and cocks sliding together, of sex and touches and arousal.

Elliot felt drunk. He had never in all his life needed sex before; it had always been an afterthought, something he usually took when it was offered but rarely sought out and even less rarely enjoyed. He’d never really understood before how totally an orgasm could rip him clean apart and leave him feeling strung out and euphoric and a bit like his head had exploded. He’d never wanted to _touch_ someone so much before, but he wanted to touch Jonah _all the time_. And every touch was a revelation, not only because being able to touch Jonah whenever he wanted was still new and delicious and arousing, and not only because Jonah’s eyes softened so beautifully each and every time, but because their touches carried coded, charged transfers of affection. That was new, too.

He and Nicholas had always touched casually and often, and Elliot had always loved that easy exchange of intimacy. But Jonah’s touches lingered on his skin, were constant and ever-present and thorough, a perpetual hum of ‘I want you’ beneath Elliot’s skin that constantly escalated his own need for contact until they were caught in a giant feedback loop of touching and the desire for more touching.

And Jonah just kept letting Elliot pet him and intertwine their fingers and stroke his wrists, and thumb his elbows and his kneecaps and his hipbones and his cheekbones, and make sure their thighs touched when they sat next to each other, and rake his fingernails over his skin and press against him at night so their bodies aligned and Jonah’s deep breathing thrummed against his chest. It was heady, and intense, and Jonah would occasionally make ridiculous statements about how they should be taking things slower, and Elliot would have to kiss him quiet, which was perfectly all right because Elliot liked kissing Jonah even more than he liked touching Jonah, and that was also overwhelming in its way.

Elliot had kissed plenty of people; he was a champion at college makeout sessions and drunk party game snogging and aesthetically satisfactory first dates that ended with aesthetically satisfactory kisses. Jonah, however, appreciated none of Elliot’s perfectly cultivated aesthetic abilities; he kissed Elliot hungrily and naughtily and with copious amounts of tongue-fucking and lip-tugging and a completely savage amount of biting, and it was ridiculously hot, and that was all just what Jonah did to his _mouth_.

In bed, he liked to strip Elliot off and press him against the mattress and pin him there, stretched out above him, and when he’d slowly rutted against Elliot a few times, gotten him aroused and trembling, he would go to work with his mouth and his hands. Jonah would sweep his palms in warm movements over Elliot’s face and neck and shoulders, his chest and hips and thighs, his ass and his stomach and his abdomen, and down to his calves and his knees and even his ankles, and everywhere he touched he would whisk teasing, soft kisses over Elliot’s skin, again and again, until Elliot was a shivering sensitive wreck, and then and only then would he move to Elliot’s cock and kiss him there, too. And after he’d brought Elliot off in a torturous crescendo of sound and sweat and come, if Elliot was relaxed enough, and if he begged sweetly enough, Jonah would slide inside of him, and of all the things Elliot had never before realized about sex, this, _this,_ the way Jonah’s cock felt moving inside of him, was the biggest revelation of all.

The summer before he’d started college, Elliot had spent a determined and embarrassing few weeks working on his power bottoming techniques using a cheap mail-order butt plug and the help of Google. At the time, he’d assumed, more or less correctly, that going off to college would mean a constant barrage of sexual invitations, and he wanted to be ready, which meant yoga stretches and fiber diets and developing a pelvic floor and ass muscles made of molten steel. He’d done his best to prepare, and had gotten pretty good at fucking himself for long stretches of time with the biggest dildo he could unobtrusively get his hands on; however, he’d also assumed, totally incorrectly, that when the time actually came to have sex, he’d be into it.

But Elliot had never been into sex. He hadn’t hated it, and occasionally he’d wanted it, but he’d just never found penetrative sex, in any direction, as exciting in reality as it was in his head. When he took home one-night stands, he tended to give them elaborate, too-long blow jobs that left them too exhausted for more, and if they wanted more he’d almost always offer to ride them because that was usually the best way to get everyone off quickly and with a minimum of mess. Years after he and Caroline had dated, she’d commented that the fact they spent more time laughing in bed than fucking should have tipped her off that he was borderline asexual. He hadn’t really bothered to correct her; for all he’d known, he _was_ asexual, if asexual encompassed wanting sex a lot more in theory than in practice.

He’d wanted sex with Nicholas. For as long as he’d _known_ Nicholas he’d thought about Nicholas’s cock and his ass and his hipbones and the bittersweet taste of his come, and how they’d probably lounge about all day in bed playing board games or something instead of fucking. And it had all sounded lovely, the way Sunday mornings with Nicholas were always lovely, relaxed and sweet and cozy and warm.

But Nicholas never hit on him unless he was totally wasted, so Elliot never got to move beyond vague visualizations of what Nicholas might be like in bed; and meanwhile, the two of them had warm cozy days and evenings anyway.

And it had been fine, it had been nice, and if yearning for Nicholas ever got to be too intense, well, he always had the occasional one night stand to remind him how much he typically disliked sex.

So Elliot rarely had anal sex, and his sex toys rarely got used, and his muscles rarely got the kind of workout they needed to prep him for constant sex with a man like Jonah, who not only routinely topped his partners but also liked to take his time inside Elliot until Elliot was gasping and pleading and shivering. Elliot _very much_ wanted Jonah to take his time, he wanted Jonah to take as much time as he liked, because it turned out Elliot _loved_ having Jonah inside of him, which meant that Elliot found himself once more doing yoga stretches and breathing exercises and floor workouts and reaching for the largest dildo he could find, and most mortifying of all, actually having to _talk_ to Jonah about all of it—about how he felt and what he wanted and how much actual experience he’d had with various activities.

It was all terrifyingly adult. Jonah insisted on establishing boundaries and then respecting said boundaries and doing things like communicating, and discussing methods of protection, all  in this gentle firm adult voice that horrified and embarrassed Elliot endlessly.

“Do you get this charmingly embarrassed about every serious conversation?” Jonah said to him one night as they lay together, palm splayed over Elliot’s chest, Elliot’s fingers loosely laced in his own. He was propped on one arm, looking down at Elliot with that steady gaze of amused affection that Elliot had rapidly begun to long for. “If I were asking you for a discussion about, say, financial investments instead of sexual techniques, would you be this mortified?”

“ _Yes_ ,” said Elliot, doubly mortified. Jonah’s slow grin spread across his face like the sun slipping over the horizon, and Elliot wanted him _so much_. He ran his thumb over Jonah’s lips. “You are a terrifying adult. Everything about you mortifies me.”

“Oh, really,” said Jonah. He kissed Elliot gently on the mouth, and Elliot curled his fingers in his hair with a contented shiver. “Like what?”

“Smoking jacket,” Elliot lied immediately.

“Mock away,” said Jonah blithely, biting his chin, “but you should know I only started wearing it as a joke to begin with, and then I had to keep wearing it, because every time I did, you would spend the entire night staring at me like you want to _devour_ me.”

Elliot pulled him closer, nudging his hips apart so he could tug him down and arch against him. “See,” he said, running his hand down Jonah’s back and palming his ass. “That’s what I mean, it is _completely_ mortifying.”

“Ah,” said Jonah, taking the hint and stretching out on top of Elliot, his body lean and warm. “So when you say ‘mortifying’ you mean ‘secretly irresistible.’” He reached down and tugged Elliot’s cock with warm fingers, and even though Elliot had been certain that he was fully sated for a good while yet he felt himself responding. He squirmed happily.

“In that case,” Jonah said, laying kisses against Elliot’s neck, “you are the most mortifying individual I have ever met.” And then he kissed Elliot, and Elliot pulled him down and drowned and drowned until Jonah finally allowed him to surface.

Partly because it was still too new, and partly because Elliot was trying his best to avoid discussing, or thinking about, the Nicholas Situation, he and Jonah didn’t tell anyone that they were together, for whatever value of “together” it meant when you more or less temporarily moved in with the guy you’d just started fucking because you couldn’t stop fucking him, and also because in practical terms you needed to use his wifi and his bed and his shower.

Except Jane; Elliot told Jane because she saw everything. “You seem happy,” she said, officially one week and two days into the thing with Jonah. The night before they’d all gone to Deep Ellum after rehearsal, and Jonah had sat beside Elliot in the far back corner of the bar, and their hands had roamed over each other, unseen, all evening, which was absolutely torturous and drove Elliot out of his skin with longing, until finally Jonah had called it a night and left early, which forced Elliot to kill another twenty minutes or so dodging Nicholas’s questions about what he’d been doing with himself all week before he could finally scramble out of his seat and back to Jonah’s apartment, and Jonah had flung him unceremoniously down on the living room rug the moment he walked in and rimmed him until he was delirious and then fucked him within an inch of his life, for the first time not gently or patiently but like Elliot was his personal rag doll and he could have him however he liked, and Elliot had carpet burns _everywhere_ , and he still felt wrung out and delicious and well-used half a day later, and so, yes, he seemed happy.

“Like, _suspiciously_ happy. Where are you? Whose apartment is that?” She squinted. “Wait, is... are you at _Jonah_ ’s?” She pulled back from her laptop and gave him a long look. “Elliot,” she said, meaningfully.

“What?” said Elliot. “I’m just working at Jonah’s place for a few days, it’s no big deal.”

“Okay,” said Jane, “I may be in California, but I can still tell when you’re lying from three thousand miles away.”

“It’s not a lie,” said Elliot, waving his hand at the apartment. Jonah had already left for his rehearsal at the Huntington and Elliot had been distractedly sending client emails and monitoring hashtags from the relative respectability of the living room couch. He spared a moment to be grateful he hadn’t opened Skype while working from Jonah’s bed.

“Okay,” said Jane, “Let me see if I can put two and four together here and come up with ‘holy shit you’re sleeping with Jonah.’”

“I’m not—”

“Shush,” said Jane. “Fact: you have always had your weird Jonah thing.”

“I do not have a weird Jonah thing,” Elliot protested. “Why does everyone think I have a weird Jonah thing?”

“Because we have eyes and we can see your weird Jonah thing,” said Jane. “And you’ve been spending tons of time with Jonah lately because of the podcast, which has caused your weird Jonah thing to be weirder than ever.”

“How do you even know this?” said Elliot.

“Hello, you’re not the only person who sends me random podcast gossip,” said Jane. “Kate has been pleasantly surprised by how well you’ve been getting along, considering your past animosity. Nicholas is glad you’re all friends again. Caroline has been wondering if there was something going on between the two of you ever since that night at the Hong Kong.”

“Caroline isn’t even _in_ the podcast!” Elliot protested.

“Silence,” Jane commanded. “Fact: when we Skyped two weeks ago you mentioned off-handedly that Nicholas had been, quote, ‘busy lately,’ which struck me as weird, because if there’s one thing Nicholas always is, it’s busy, and if there’s one thing Nicholas never is, it’s busy enough for you to actually _register_ that he’s busy, because that would mean he’s not only busy, but off being busy somewhere away from you. So I thought, ‘what could distract Nicholas enough to be busy away from Elliot, with whom he is inseparable?’”

“Nicholas has exams,” said Elliot with dignity.

“False,” said Jane. “I mean, I’m sure he does, but the point is that I was asking the wrong question. _You_ were off being busy and distracted away from _Nicholas_.”

“Okay, Miss Fisher, maybe don’t quit your job at Google any time soon—” Elliot started. Jane held up her hand and made the shushing motion with it.

“Fact,” she said. “Last week you pinged me and you were obviously agitated about something and I didn’t press you on it because I was in the middle of a million work things. Later that day, I noticed that the night before, Jonah had tweeted, ‘The moon was lovely tonight. I barely noticed.’”

“I—” Elliot halted. “Really?” he said, going to look. “Oh,” he said, staring at the tweet on Jonah’s account. Most of his other tweets were run-of-the-mill podcast stuff, and back-and-forths with Elliot operating Emerson’s Twitter account. But there it was, the night of their walk along the esplanade.

“Oh my god,” said Jane. “Oh my _god_ , Elliot. You should see your face right now.”

Elliot didn’t answer because if Elliot tried to answer his face was probably going to get about ten times more embarrassing.

“You were agitated because something had happened between you and Jonah, hadn’t it,” she said. “You were registering that Nicholas was busy because ‘Nicholas is busy’ was code for ‘I’m distracted.’ You were distracted because _you_ _were_ _falling for Jonah_.”

“This is a lot to extrapolate from me sitting in Jonah’s living room.”

“Are you wearing pants?” asked Jane.

Elliot froze.

“A- _ha_ ,” said Jane.

“Okay,” said Elliot, and, “I can explain,” and, “It’s like this.”

“Oh, I know what it’s like,” said Jane. “Wow. _Wow._ ”

“Do you—do you think it’s a bad idea?” Elliot asked her, a little nervously, wondering how he could explain to her that it was anything but.

Jane sat back from her laptop and looked contemplative. “I think,” she said finally, “I think this was probably coming for a long time, and I think it must be something really unique to pull you away from Nicholas.”

“I haven’t gotten pulled away,” said Elliot. “I mean. I haven’t told Nicholas yet.”

“ _What_? Elliot, you have to tell him. If you don’t he’s going to figure it out anyway, and you wouldn’t want to hurt him like that.”

Elliot scoffed. “I’m not sure he’d care.”

Jane narrowed her eyes. “Of course he’d care. Besides, what do you think he’s going to think when you just suddenly are never over at his place anymore?”

“It’s not like that,” said Elliot, suddenly rethinking this conversation. “I don’t—this thing with Jonah just started, I don’t even know if it’s going to go anywhere.”

Jane snorted. “Please.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re sitting pantsless in Jonah’s apartment completely blissed out from all the amazing sex you’ve been having and meanwhile Jonah has been waiting for this window of opportunity for _years_. If you think this is just going to go nowhere you’re a fool.”

“You knew?” Elliot stared at her. “You knew about Jonah? How long have you known about Jonah?”

Jane shrugged elegantly. “I figured it out.”

“ _When_?”

Jane studied a fingernail.

“Jane,” Elliot said in the sternest voice he could muster.

“Fine,” Jane said. “The production retreat for _South Pacific_.”

“You weren’t even there for that.”

“Wrong, I was there for that first night, the campfire.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “Oh, yeah.” _South Pacific_ had been an unusually large production; they’d had about 40 people at that campfire, out on the grass on somebody’s parents’ wooded Dover estate. Elliot remembered the night had been crisp and beautiful, one of those priceless autumn nights that hung over his general memory of school. He and Jonah had had a long, heated argument about Edward Albee that trailed off when they accidentally started agreeing with each other, after which he and Caroline had gotten tipsy off cider and tried to play pin the tails on all the donkeys—the donkeys being most of their male friends. At one point, Elliot had unwisely tried to pin the tail on Jonah, who had firmly redirected him by closing his hand over the one holding the donkey tail and snapping at Nicholas to come and collect his boyfriend. After that he’d disappeared somewhere; Elliot remembered seeing him later with his head bowed close to Hazel, deep in conversation. “Did he say something to you?”

Jane shrugged. “I just... he was sitting on the other side of the campfire, but he was watching you.”

“I was probably being loud and distracting,” said Elliot.

“No,” said Jane. “I mean, you probably were. But no, this was... I got the impression he was really hung up on you. And I just happened to be looking at the right moment to see it.”

“But that was junior year,” said Elliot, stricken. “Jane, that was four years ago.”

Jane said, “So you see why you can’t just write this off as some sort of fling. He may not have said it in as many words, but I feel like this is the total opposite of a fling for Jonah.”

“But, but he’s _Jonah_ ,” said Elliot. “He’s got an endless line of hot twinks to go home with. His bedroom should come with a revolving door. And he’s got a successful theatrical career and he goes to fancy theatre parties and gets swanky media profiles, and, and why would someone like that fall for... _me_?”

“You should just ask him that.” Elliot scoffed dramatically. “If it helps,” Jane said, “I’ve seen Jonah go home with plenty of hot twinks, but I’ve never seen him spend over an hour arguing with any of them.”

“We never argued for over an—”

“Freshman year, Jason Robert Brown,” Jane said.

“Oh. Yeah. That was a good argument. But that was just—”

“Senior year, which Tony host was the greatest, with a side of that weird argument about Julie Harris and Julie Andrews which I don’t even think _you_ completely understood. Sophomore year, that debate over theatre bootlegs.”

“Okay, that was more like a serious discussion, and the Julie thing was—”

“Also sophomore year, that argument that Adam Guettel was inherently unstageable that ended with the two of you totally plastered and breaking into the Black Box at midnight in order to test your theory by performing _Light in the Piazza_ from memory.”

Elliot laughed. “That wasn’t even an argument, that was just awesome.”

“There was also that time in the Eggplant the two of you decided to host a _Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!_ party, and no one came but me and Blake, so we just got to sit there while the two of you debated how hot Antonio Banderas was and whether the film was promoting BDSM or just arguing that sexual assault can be kinda fun.”

“That was a great party and that’s a great film.”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you thought these things were great because they were moments when you and Jonah were actually enjoying being together?”

Elliot scowled. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to work?”

“Oh, we are so past the work excuse,” said Jane. “And this is all just the stuff I was there for. Remember junior year, when we were in Salem for that random wiccan homeopathy fest you wanted to go to and he called you from Hartford to rant about the Yale Rep production of _Assassins_ and you stayed on the phone until your battery died? And that time senior year when you got stranded in Concord because you misread the bus schedule, so he called the bus station and pretended to be an outraged supervisor and got them to put you up in the Sheraton for the night.”

Elliot looked down at his hands.

“You’re blushing,” Jane said. “Did you really have no idea how he felt about you all this time?”

“I just... it was easy to write it all off as Jonah being Jonah,” he said.  

“And you were eager to write it off.”

Elliot didn’t deny it.

Jane scrutinized him. “To be honest, Elliot, I know it’s new and you’re still freaking out about it, but I think it could be the total opposite of a fling for you, too.”

Elliot thought back to Jonah telling him why he’d moved out of the Eggplant. _Because you weren’t ready to admit you wanted it, too_.  

Was he ready for this, still? Was he ready for something serious and grown-up and real, something with consequences?

Something without Nicholas?

“Hey,” said Jane. “Am I freaking you out more? Sorry.”

“You’re not freaking me out,” said Elliot automatically. “I wish you were here.”

Jane laughed. “I wish I were there, too. You don’t even want to know how crazy things are here right now.”

“How crazy are they?” said Elliot, looking for his phone to see if Jonah had texted him in the last twenty minutes.

“No, no talk about my bizarro work life,” said Jane. Jonah hadn’t texted him so Elliot sent him a dumb cat emoji. “And hey, surprise, I _am_ coming back next week for your big podcast party.”

“That’s next week,” Elliot echoed. “You’ll be back _next week_. I’m going to get to see you in _days_.” Jane beamed at him.

“So you better make it the biggest party ever,” she said.

Jonah texted him back. It was another dumb cat emoji, this one with heart eyes.

 _You should hurry home_ , Elliot texted him, because that was slightly less pathetic than an endless string of _I miss yous_.

“It’ll be big,” he told Jane absently. “It’ll be the biggest. You’ll love it.”

  


Before Elliot could wow Jane with his magnificent podcast party, he had to get through Blake’s weekly-monthly party, where he had exciting plans to alternate sitting around the pool getting high with shoving Jonah into the shadows and making out where no one could see.

Before he could get through Blake’s weekly-monthly party, however, he had to renew his supply of clothes, which meant he had to actually make a stop by his parents’ house, where his mom promptly greeted him with, “You haven’t been returning my calls, I thought you were dead.”

“Hello to you, too, mom,” he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

“I stopped by Nicholas’s place the other day to see if you had anything you wanted me to take to the cleaners for you, and you weren’t _there_ ,” she said. It was a leading statement, and when he didn’t pick it up, she put her hands on her hips and said, “Did you and Nicholas have a fight?”

She sounded so _concerned_ , and her brain immediately went to _Nicholas_ , and it suddenly dawned on Elliot that his mother probably _thought he and Nicholas were already in a relationship_.

He let out an uncontrollable, shrill little laugh.

“Wait, no, mom,” he said, awkwardly. “It’s not like that,” he said. “Nicholas and I aren’t together, mom, you know that, right?”

“Not together?” his mother echoed. “You mean you broke up? Why? Things seemed so good.” She carded her fingers soothingly through his hair. “Although I have to say I did wonder why the two of you weren’t actually officially living together. Not that I don’t mind you living over the garage, but it just seemed like since you were over there all the time—”

“No, no, mom, that’s not it,” Elliot said, and his throat was tight and this was a _ridiculous_ conversation, but thank god he was having it before he tried to re-introduce his parents to Jonah.  “You don’t understand. We’ve never been in a relationship.”

His mother pulled back and stared down at him. “What?”

“Ever,” Elliot said. “We’ve never... we’ve never been in a relationship. We’re just friends.”

“I don’t understand,” said his mother.

“Why do I feel like I should hire Edward R. Murrow to break this information to you?” said Elliot. “Nicholas and I were never in a relationship.”

“But you sleep over his place all the time,” said his mother. “You practically moved in with him.”

“Yeah, but, like, on the couch,” said Elliot, suddenly mortified. “I always slept on the couch.”

“On the couch,” his mother repeated flatly. “For the last two years my son was sleeping on the couch.”

“Okay,” said Elliot, “I know it sounds—”

“Elliot,” his mother said, “honestly, I am totally not alarmed that you’ve been having sex with Nicholas all this time, I’ve been okay with that—”

“But I haven’t been,” Elliot said, and now he was mortified _and_ humiliated. “I’m telling the truth. We’ve never been _anything_ but friends.”

His mother’s mouth opened and closed, and Elliot was about to change the entire subject when his dad wandered in. “Oh, Elliot,” he said. “You’re here. Must be dry-cleaning time again.”

“Come and listen to your son,” said Elliot’s mother. “Come and listen to what he’s saying.”

“What’s he saying?” his dad asked, helping himself to a box of Frosted Flakes even though it was nearly noon on a weekday. Elliot’s dad kept sporadic work hours ever since he’d made partner at his law firm; Elliot probably came by his work ethic genetically.

“He’s saying he and Nicholas aren’t actually in a relationship and never have been,” his mother said, shooting him a look.

“Well don’t look at me like it’s my _fault_ ,” Elliot protested.

“What, you and Nicholas?” said his dad, “Are you just now calling it serious?”

“No, dad, no,” said Elliot. “I’m not dating Nicholas. I’ve never been dating Nicholas. I’m dating Jonah.”

Elliot’s mother and father exchanged mutual glances of bewilderment. “Jonah, your _other_ roommate from when you were living with Nicholas?” asked his mother.

“Doesn’t Elliot still live with Nicholas?” his dad interjected.

“Apparently not anymore,” said his mother skeptically.

“Elliot,” said his father, “you know we love you no matter who you choose to be with.”

“Uh, great?” said Elliot. He stole a handful of flakes out of the cereal box and tried to sound nonchalant. “I mean. I’m not sure how real this love is, and all, since you still won’t let me legally change my name to add an extra ‘t’ to the end—”

“We’ve told you and told you, kiddo, Elliot is a family name, you’re stuck with it—”

“But, hey, it’s great you want me to date whoever I want.”

“Jonah seemed like a nice man,” said his mother. “He’s the one with the _Globe_ profile, right?”

“That’s the one.”

“He’s a real up-and-comer,” said his mother. “Are you sleeping on _his_ couch?”

“Mom!”

“I don’t know about all this,” said his father. “You and Nicholas really aren’t in a relationship?”

“Oh, my _god_ ,” said Elliot.

After Elliot had gotten through a tortured attempt to explain how he could have spent most of the last three years either living together with Nicholas or sleeping on his couch every night, all without actually sleeping with him, or knowing whether or not Nicholas actually wanted to sleep with him, his mother stood up from the kitchen table looking dazed and said, “Well, the only thing I know to do in this situation is make granola French toast and explain to you what a real relationship is.”

“I _know_ what a relationship is,” said Elliot. “Also, it’s after noon.”

“ _Do you_?” said his mother, slamming the griddle on the stove with the noisy clatter that told Elliot she was a bit upset over it all. “Because it’s _not_ what you had with Nicholas. In case there was any doubt about that.”

“Then—” _Then why do I feel like we’re taking a break_? Elliot almost blurted.

His dad reached over and patted his hand. “Look, you’re clearly in some kind of relationship with Nicholas. You clearly care about each other a lot. And that’s good. But your mom is trying to tell you that you shouldn’t have settled so long for something that didn’t give you any kind of real—” he floundered. “What’s the word I want?”

“Intimacy?” muttered his mother. “Romance? Partnership?”

“We had—we partnership,” said Elliot. “We... we had those things.”

“You had a simulation of those things,” said his mother. “Sleeping on the _couch_ , for _two years_ , my god. Your poor spine. Do you even know how many back problems you’ve given yourself?”

“Well, if it helps any,” said Elliot, thankful Nicholas would never have to know about this conversation, “I’m thinking about getting my own apartment, and if I do I’m totally buying a Casper.”

“No, you will not,” said his mother. “You are absolutely not buying one of those fiberglass podcast mattresses off the internet. We are going into a real store and getting you something with springs.”

“Yes, mom,” said Elliot obediently.

“And—and Jonah can come too, of course,” said his dad, patting him on the back—probably too gently, like he feared he might shove Elliot’s vertebrae out of alignment.

“I don’t really think we’re at the furniture-buying stage,” said Elliot.

“Thank goodness for that, you don’t need any _more_ furniture to sleep on,” said his mother dryly.

“ _Mom_ ,” said Elliot.

“You know what, nevermind, I don’t need to know whether you’re getting orthopedically sound sleep,” said his mother, setting a plate full of french toast and granola in front of him. “Just tell me if he wants children.”

“I’m in hell,” said Elliot.

“You look fitter,” said his dad, squinting. “Have you been working out?”

  
  


“Your mother thinks I’m upwardly mobile,” repeated Jonah as they walked up the drive to Blake’s party.  Any second now they would need to stop holding hands, but Elliot was delaying it for a few more moments.

“Yeah, well, my mom also thinks you’re going to make her a grandmother, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in her high hopes for you.”

“Does she know we’ve only been together for a week?”

“Excuse you, a week and four days.”

“Ah, correction. Those extra four days have made all the difference.”

“I think she’s just under the impression for some reason that I need to make up for lost time.”

Jonah cut him a sidewise glance. “I wonder why,” he said dryly, and dropped Elliot’s hand just as Blake opened the door to greet them.

Normally Blake’s parties were as weirdly eccentric as parties at one’s parents’ house could be. They would get there and Blake would have set up velvet ropes and taken them on a tour of his parents’ house like it was Graceland or something. Or they would be told to sit all around the edge of Blake’s parents’ pool with their feet in the water tossing cantaloupes back and forth. Whatever they were, Elliot had little say in planning them. He just showed up with a pink drink pre-mixed and engaged in whatever eccentricity Blake had decided upon.

This particular night, however, Elliot suspected that Blake would be going all out to impress Jonah, mainly because he had called Elliot a few days prior to the party and asked, “So how can I impress Jonah?”

“Why do you want to impress Jonah?” Elliot had asked, followed by, “And why are you asking _me_ how to impress Jonah? And why are you asking _now_?”

“Obviously I want to impress Jonah because Jonah knows how to get work as an actor, so it stands to reason he can help _me_ get work as an actor,” said Blake. “And you and Hazel know Jonah better than anybody else, but when I asked Hazel, she just rolled her eyes and suggested I go on auditions, like _that_ would help any. And I’m asking now because this will be the first party of mine he’s been to in ages.”

“You should just talk to him,” Elliot had said. “But not, like, the way you usually talk to him. Just ask him about getting started in the local scene, he loves talking about that.”

“But that would make me sound like a novice instead of a seasoned veteran who just needs a boost ahead of the less talented competition. I need him to, like, remember that I’m a witty and successful and charismatic entertainer.”

“Your last standup gig was the open mic night at Trader Vic’s.”

“Yeah, but the hostess told me I had the biggest laugh of the evening.”

“Okay, well,” said Elliot, suppressing a grin, “I hear Jonah likes really elaborate performance art.” He dug out his phone and texted Jonah, _What are your thoughts on performance art?_

“Really?” asked Blake. “Are you talking more, like, Abramovic, or John Cage here?”

“I’m thinking more like, You Like Jonah and Jonah Likes You,” said Elliot.

“What?”

“You got any wild dogs handy?”

“There are some pretty bold wild squirrels running around my parents’ place. A few raccoons.”

“Perfect,” said Elliot, “Jonah _loves_ raccoons,” as Jonah texted him back, _I absolutely am not going to ask why you’re asking me this._  Elliot grinned and replied, _Good_.

“Huh,” said Blake. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Elliot had been holding Jonah’s hand in one hand and a pre-mixed mai tai in another, and he was lucky that he’d disengaged from Jonah, because when he saw what Blake was wearing when he opened the door, he nearly dropped his drink altogether.

“Greetings, friends!” said Blake. He was dressed completely in a grey felt bodysuit, and his head was adorned with a bunch of spikes that made him look vaguely like a hedgehog. Over the body suit he was wearing a vest that appeared to be made out of pine needles glued haphazardly onto construction paper, and over his nose he wore a rubber-banded flat plastic proboscis.  As they stared at him, he held out his hands and murmured an elaborate series of gibberish accompanied by erratic hand gestures.

“Did you just enchant us?” asked Jonah.

“Are you wearing a _fursuit_?” asked Elliot.

“Are you practicing for your _Project Runway_ audition?” asked Jonah.

“Did you already _fail_ your _Project Runway_ audition?” asked Elliot.

“Silence, mortals,” said Blake cheerfully. “I have placed protection wards around you so that you may enter the domain of the Pukwudgie. Come!”

“The what?” asked Elliot as Blake took them along the walk to the pool.

“The feared Pukwudgie,” said Blake, “friend to man and animal alike, native to the Massachussian wilds of Cape Cod.” He paused and looked over his shoulder at Jonah. “I believe you are a native of Cape Cod, are you not?”

Elliot grew very preoccupied with drinking his mai tai. Jonah cut him a meaningful look, then said, with every appearance of sincere delight, “Indeed I am! Are you any relation to the Bridgewater Triangle pukwudgies or are they a different species?”

“Oh, entirely different in terms of character,” said Blake somberly. “The Bridgewater pukwudgies are a very vicious breed, quite sinister.”

“It must be due to all the Satanism,” said Jonah. Elliot elbowed him. Jonah pinched Elliot’s waist and Elliot jumped just as Blake turned back to them.

Jonah smiled innocently, and Blake clearly read this as approval, because his face lit up. “Also, they’re known to commune with Sasquatch, which probably enacts a kind of negative peer pressure,” he said, and led them to the pool.

Blake’s parents’ pool was generally the best reason to come to Blake’s weekly-monthly parties, because it was large and landscaped and double-tiered and had a fire pit and a hot tub. Tonight, however, all around the pool deck, Blake had placed what Elliot could only process as straw tents where the lounge chairs usually were. On second glance, he realized Blake had constructed the straw tents _over_ the lounge chairs. He discerned Caroline’s feet just peeking out of one of them, and, on closer inspection, saw the rest of her drinking heavily. He sent her a quizzical look. She shook her head as if to say, _I have no idea_ , and took a long swig of her cocktail.

“The fearsome Pukwudgie,” said Blake, “native of the fortean New England wilderness, fellow traveler alongside the ancient Wampanoag and the Algonquin, and friend to you and me, prefers to spend his or her time in straw huts or roadside ditches. Please, choose your preferred domains for the evening.”

“Are we all supposed to be honorary pukwudgie for the evening?” asked Elliot. “Pukwudgies?”

“Pukwudgie is the plural as well as the singular for our kind,” said Blake.

“I didn’t bring my pukwudgie transformation amulet with me,” said Jonah.

“Never fear,” said Blake. “Kate is currently doing an essential meditation that will allow you to channel your inner pukwudgie.” He pointed to the corner of the patio, and Elliot realized Kate had been there all along, precariously balancing on one foot with her eyes closed.

“Do we have to balance on one foot?”

“Oh, not if you don’t want to,” said Blake easily. “Only it helps you walk the precarious border between our own world and the spirit world from whence the pukwudgie comes.”

“Of course you should balance on one foot,” Jonah told Elliot blandly. Elliot pinched him.

“Also,” Blake said, “we pukwudgie have a special arrow-shooting ritual in which we bless the person who can shoot the arrow the farthest with infinite pukwudgie wisdom.” He pointed across the yard to where he’d set up an arrow target. A crossbow and a quiver were leaning against it. “As the pukwudgie find you, Jonah, the most promising of all the potential pukwudgie, we would like you to go first in the pukwudgie crossbow-shooting contest.”

“I have a feeling the pukwudgie are going to be highly disappointed in me,” said Jonah.

“This seems highly appropriative of Native American culture,” said Elliot, draining the rest of his mai tai. “Do the pukwudgie have a preference for wine or liquor?”

“As pukwudgie, we shall need neither the substance humans call alcohol nor the sustenance you—” he halted as he registered that Elliot’s eyes were growing wider with every word. “Okay, fine,” he said, breaking character. “The pool bar is fully stocked, help yourself.”

“Thank god,” said Jonah.

“Blake, you are a prince among pukwudgies,” said Elliot.

“Pukwudgie,” Jonah corrected mildly.

“Oh, Kate seems to have achieved enlightenment,” said Blake, scampering off.

Jonah made a beeline for the pool bar, herding Elliot there with his hand on his waist, but somehow on their way there, they found themselves taking a detour behind Blake’s parents’ guest house, which was the other best reason to come to Blake’s parents’ house. It lay along a tree-lined path that ran from the pool down to the boat docks, and it opened onto a wide lawn perfect for campfires or lying and looking at stars or making out beneath the moonlight. The inside of the guest house was huge, and Blake always left it unlocked on party nights so friends could crash there as needed. Waking up in the guest house with hazy memories and often embarrassing sex partners was a recurring joke among their social circle; they’d all done it.

Elliot had assumed he and Jonah would inevitably wind up beneath the canopy of trees behind the guest house at some point during the night; he just hadn’t imagined it would be so soon. But Jonah ducked out of sight behind the far side of the building where the shadows were thickest, and tugged Elliot into his arms. The moon was lovely tonight, Elliot thought. I barely noticed.

“Did you, by any chance,” said Jonah, lips quivering, “tell Blake that I enjoy paranormal performance art?”

“Not a word, I swear, not a word,” said Elliot, trying and failing to sound remotely convincing. “He came up with this all on his own.”

“Did he,” said Jonah, kissing the side of Elliot’s neck.

Elliot arched against him and tightened his arms around Jonah’s waist. “There may have been a few hints.”

“Poor Blake,” Jonah muttered. “And poor me, I’m going to have to pretend to be enthusiastic about cryptozoology until he gets distracted and forgets the game.” He nipped at Elliot’s ear lobe. Elliot shuddered and pressed him up against the side of the guest house.

“I bet the guest house is unlocked,” Elliot whispered, tugging him down for a proper kiss.

“We just _got_ here,” said Jonah, in between kisses.

“Look, if you want to go back to the pool and pick separate straw tent pukwudgie domains, be my guest.”

“I should never have let you out of bed to begin with,” Jonah muttered.

“Agreed,” said Elliot. Jonah kissed his way over Elliot’s jawline, grinning roguishly when he left Elliot shivering.

“So how to keep from ravishing you ten minutes into this party?”

“No suggestions here,” Elliot murmured, offering Jonah his throat.

“Fuck it,” Jonah said decisively, and dragged him inside the guest house.

Two mutual blowjobs and a hopefully successful attempt to look unravished later, Jonah, and later Elliot, emerged separately from the guest house and wound their way back to the party bar. By now more people had arrived, and more feet were poking out of straw tent lounges. Jonah seemed to have disappeared into the main house; instead, Caroline and Blake were engaged in an argument over whether the pukwudgie was a cultural appropriation—which Blake was attempting to conduct while in-character—and Nicholas was standing off to the side watching them and grinning.

Elliot stopped and took a moment to drink him in. It was so strange not to have seen him in days. They’d talked plenty of times in the week since, but it had all been through quick, distracted texts, nothing like normal.

Nicholas saw him and greeted Elliot with a broad grin and a hug.

“It feels so weird to not have seen you in a week,” Nicholas said, and Elliot pulled back to try to read his face. It was open and he was smiling, but Elliot thought he looked a bit pensive, a bit questioning.

“How’d your exams go?”

“Great, actually,” said Nicholas. “I mean, barring overconfidence and overcaffeination I think I did really well.”

“You owe me a celebratory dinner,” said Elliot.

This felt wrong. He and Nicholas were supposed to have practically all their dinners together. He was already supposed to know how Nicholas’s exams had gone, because he was supposed to be living in Nicholas’s back pocket. He thought back to what his mother had called it: a simulation of a real relationship.

“After tomorrow’s party,” said Nicholas, still beaming at him. “Sunday? Or any day next week. Every day next week. I’ll be done with exams, so...” he let it trail off.

Elliot smiled back. Nicholas would be done with exams. Maybe everything could go back to normal.

But what _was_ normal? Was normal sleeping on Nicholas’s couch waiting for him to throw Elliot one of his casual touches that never went anywhere? Was it sneaking out to Jonah’s apartment and then sneaking back to Nicholas and pretending nothing was happening?

Elliot no longer had any idea.

“We Pukwudgie have heard that the woman you humans call J.K. Rowling has already mainstreamed our likeness for her whimsical series of magical children’s books,” Blake was saying. “How is this different?”

“Using J.K. Rowling as an example of what’s _not_ appropriative is a bad idea,” said Caroline.

“Hey, I think the pukwudgie is speaking to me!” called Hazel from across the yard, balancing on one foot.

Nicholas shot Elliot a glance, one of their casual shared glances, the ones Elliot was used to receiving a hundred times a day from Nicholas.

Elliot smiled back, a fraction too late, and that felt wrong, too.

 

“It’s like Bigfoot! Or the Wendigo! No one cares about appropriating the Wendigo!” Blake was saying to anyone who would listen. Elliot had taken the straw tent lounge chair between Caroline and Kate, who claimed she had now ascended completely into Pukwudgie form and had to incubate her pukwudgie eggs which meant she couldn’t leave the straw tent nest except for more vodka. Caroline and Hazel were subsequently debating whether pukwudgie were bird creatures while Hazel’s boyfriend scribbled away in his moleskine one tent over and Elliot texted Jane, currently still stuck in L.A. because of some work thing, conversation snippets with _really, really wish you were here for this_.

His plan to stay close to Jonah had been derailed since the Pukwudgie tents weren’t big enough for two people, and mostly once inside them you could only poke your head out to talk with other people who had poked their heads out, too; but Jonah was sitting across the pool from him next to Nicholas, sending him frequent amused smiles from within his pukwudgie tent, so that was all right, too.

 _You know you could just sit on the edge of the pool_ , Jane texted. _You don’t all actually *have* to sit in the pukwudgie tents_.

Elliot glanced around him. Despite copious amounts of eyerolling and giggling, not one of them had made a move to _not_ pretend to be pukwudgie for the evening. He couldn’t help smiling. His friends were awesome.

“Blake,” he said. Blake looked up from mixing what he had claimed was a special pukwudgie magic arrow potion but mostly appeared to be schnapps and Ocean Spray. “This is a great party.”

Blake beamed. “I thank you, humanoid to humanoid.” Across the pool, Jonah sent him a look so fond Elliot actually had to duck back into his tent to avoid grinning like a complete fool.

“When are we shooting the arrows?” asked Hazel. “My inner pukwudgie is rearin’ to go!”

“Rearin’ to go?”  Caroline smirked at her. “Do we pukwudgie rear? Rare? Is it rear or rare?”

“We pukwudgie don’t need to ride horses,” Kate said calmly from within her tent. “We can rear, trot, and canter independently.”

“How much vodka do you have in there?” Nicholas asked.

“I think it’s the vodka she’s nesting,” said Jonah.

“So... could someone clarify,” Hazel’s boyfriend asked, and they all turned to him, startled that he’d spoken. “Are we birds or horses?”

“Neither,” said Hazel matter-of-factly. “We are Pukwudgie, which is a kind of bird-rodent-human. I think.”

“Got it,” said Hazel’s boyfriend, pushing his glasses up further on his nose and resuming his writing.

Caroline sent Elliot a look brimming with silent laughter and flopped back inside her tent, drink held high.

“I have now prepared the magical arrow potion,” Blake announced from the bar, holding up his concoction.

“Is that a flirtini?” asked Nicholas.

“Absolutely not,” said Blake.

“It looks like a flirtini,” said Nicholas.

“And Nicholas would know,” said Caroline from inside the tent. He stuck his tongue out at her.

“It’s not pink enough to be a flirtini,” said Elliot.

“And Elliot would definitely know,” said Jonah.

“I’m guessing there’s some amaretto involved?” Elliot asked.

“Very good!” Blake said. “I mean. It seems, wise mortal, you are very knowledgeable about pukwudgie libations.”

“No, really, Blake, what’s in the drink?” Caroline asked, hopping up and coming over to inspect it.

Blake sent her an exasperated look. “Fine. Amaretto, peach schnapps, cranberry juice, and a splash of chambord.”

“Fancy.” She held out her hand for a drink, sipped it, and then declared the pukwudgie magic to be potent, after which they all lined up for their drinks. Jonah snuck behind him and leaned close, and for a moment Elliot got to relax into the solid warmth of him. Jonah put his palm on Elliot’s shoulder, his thumb brushing the back of Elliot’s neck, and kept it there a moment.

“So,” said Nicholas to Elliot as they collected their drinks. Elliot braced himself, but surprisingly the Pukwudgie Magical Arrow drink was neither too sweet nor too syrupy.  “You never said where you’ve been keeping yourself all week. Or, almost two weeks, I guess.”

“Oh.” Elliot shrugged. “You know. Around and about.”

“Your mom must be happy to have you sleeping in her house for once,” said Nicholas.

“Eh,” said Elliot with a weak laugh. “She can take me or leave me, most of the time.”

“I figured you’d probably crash at Caroline’s place for at least a night or two,” Nicholas continued, and why, _why_ was he still talking about this, “but she said she hadn’t heard a peep out of you.”

“It was a busy week,” Elliot tried.

“As long as you were safe and all,” said Nicholas, and there, there was that questioning look in his face again. In confusion, Elliot turned away to avoid it, and found Jonah there, looking between them with even more confusion. _Fuck_.

“Elliot crashed at my place for a couple of nights,” Jonah said, looking at Nicholas carefully. “On my couch.”

Nicholas’s expression brightened. “Oh, good, that’s great to hear. Thanks for babysitting him for me.”

Jonah said, “Was that what I was doing?” in an odd voice.

Elliot downed his entire Pukwudgie and grabbed a new one straight out of Blake’s hands.

“Yeah, I kicked him out of my apartment for the week so I could study for my finals.”

“Oh, did you,” said Jonah, with one terrible glance in Elliot’s direction.

“Didn’t he tell you? Exams are over now, though, so I guess he’ll be out of your hair.” Nicholas reached up to ruffle Elliot’s hair. Elliot drained the entirety of Blake’s Pukwudgie while Blake gaped at him indignantly.

“So I see,” said Jonah, and then he said nothing at all.

“Should we really be combining archery with alcohol?” Caroline asked, coming over to them and looping her arm around Elliot’s waist. She still had some pukwudgie left in her glass, so Elliot snatched it and drained that, too.

“Who cares?” said Hazel. “Bring on the love darts, I say.”

“I don’t think those arrows are love darts,” said Hazel’s boyfriend. “They seem like they’re used for competition.”

“Yes, competition, exactly!” Blake said eagerly. “Everyone, we’re going to line up and shoot the arrows at the dartboard thingy. And whoever hits the dartboard wins!”

“This is definitely dangerous.”

“Wait, where’s Kate, is she still nesting?”

“I am in my pukwudgie element,” Kate called.

“Jonah, we shall start with you,” said Blake, handing him a giant arrow from out of nowhere. Jonah took it with a dazed look on his face.

“Blake, I really don’t think this is a great idea,” Elliot tried, but Jonah broke in with a laugh, a harsh, sudden laugh that made them all turn and regard him curiously.

For a long moment Jonah appeared to be contemplating all the things he wanted to do with his arrow, but in the end he just sent Blake his usual charming smile and said grandly, “By all means, give me a quiver and show me a bullseye,” and Blake marched him over to the edge of the yard, and they all took turns spectacularly missing the target board, and Jonah didn’t look at Elliot once.

Hazel, probably by virtue of standing on one foot longer than anybody else during the pukwudgie meditations, and also probably by virtue of glaring the target into submission, won the archery contest, or at least came closer to the target than anybody else. While she was celebrating and all eyes were on her, Elliot tugged desperately on Jonah’s shirt sleeve and dragged him into the guest house.

Jonah came with him without a word, and shut the door behind them without a word, and then he turned to Elliot, and Elliot had always known intellectually that Jonah could act, but Elliot had never seen him drop the boisterous confident Jonah mask he wore in public before. It was devastating, how quickly his face went from politely impassive to drained of all warmth.

“Jonah, it’s not what you think,” Elliot said, although he had no idea what Jonah thought or what he even meant. “Please, just let me explain,” and Jonah laughed that strange cold laugh again.

“You still— _still_ —have no idea what you want,” Jonah said. He laughed again, and this time it was a little shrill.

“No, it’s not, I just, I didn’t mean to lie, I really thought—”

“You thought things were going to go back to normal after this,” said Jonah. “You thought you were going to have amazing sex with me for a week or two and then go back to sleeping on Nicholas’s couch.”

“That is _not_ what I thought,” said Elliot. “I just needed more time and I didn’t—I couldn’t tell him yet, I just, I panicked.”

“You told me you talked to him,” said Jonah. “Did you actually talk to him about anything?”

Elliot winced. He held his breath and then finally, miserably, shook his head.

Jonah laughed again, as though he couldn’t help himself. It was rapidly becoming Elliot’s least favorite sound in the universe.

“Of course you didn’t,” Jonah said. “Of course not. It’s like I developed temporary amnesia over the course of the last two weeks.”

“ _Jonah_ ,” said Elliot. “Please, _please_ don’t be angry with me.”

“I knew,” said Jonah, “I _knew_ I should have pressed you about what exactly he said to you, and I didn’t, I thought I’d give you a little time to tell me how things stood with the two of you, because you’re still adjusting, because things were still new, and, I thought—fuck it, you may not get this chance again, so I just. Didn’t.” He pressed a hand to his forehead and laughed again.

“I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you,” Elliot insisted. “Nicholas asked me to leave, and I had to, I just had to get away, and I didn’t know—I didn’t know what this would be like. I didn’t know how...” he swallowed. “I didn’t mean to lie.”

Jonah rubbed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. “Elliot,” he said. “I told you not to come to me until you had resolved things with Nicholas. If you want an open relationship with one or both of us, be my guest. I don’t care about that as long as we’re each happy. But I can’t be with you if you’re constantly thinking about what you _don’t_ have with Nicholas.”

“I want _this_ ,” said Elliot desperately.

“Do you?” Jonah asked him. Elliot nodded and reached for his hand and then clung to it pathetically. Jonah looked down at it.

“If you mean that,” he said, “If you want a relationship with me, then go out there, right now, and tell Nicholas that we’ve been seeing each other.”

Elliot blanched.

Jonah walked over to the door and held it open.

Elliot froze.

“I,” he started, and halted.

Out there, Nicholas was waiting to ruffle his hair and take him back to his Quincy apartment and hand him the afghan he always kept behind the couch just for Elliot and let him cuddle up with Ian Purrtis and smile at him with his fond Nicholas smile and make him coffee and toast in the morning.

Elliot missed that. He didn’t want to lose that. He felt like he was already so close to losing it, all of it, and if he went out there—if he told Nicholas the truth—it could all vanish.

He raised his eyes to Jonah’s, and Jonah’s expression seemed to flicker between hurt and uncertainty, just once, before he slipped into his calm adult mode once more.

“Jonah,” Elliot tried helplessly, and Jonah cupped his face in his hand, which was _awful_.

“Elliot,” he said softly. “Go find what you want.” He slid his thumb over Elliot’s cheek and Elliot’s stomach turned over.

“I want you,” Jonah said. “You know that I want you. But I am not waiting on you.”

And he kissed Elliot’s forehead and walked out.

  


When Elliot emerged from the guest house after what felt like years, the others were ranged around the pool chatting like it was suddenly a normal party, and Jonah was nowhere in sight.

“Hey,” said Nicholas, shooting him a smile. “You missed it. Blake felt the mystical departure of all pukwudgie spirits from the vicinity. So now we’re all human again.”

“Great,” said Elliot.

“Funny, it happened right after Jonah left,” said Nicholas, grin growing, “so he missed it, too.”

Caroline kicked him in the shin. He splashed water at her. Elliot suddenly felt nauseous.

“Can we go home?” he blurted.

Nicholas looked up at him, startled. “Now?”

“I... miss your couch,” said Elliot, too miserable to care how that sounded.

Nicholas blinked. He exchanged an odd look with Caroline, and then said, “Sure. I wanted you to see my whole Emerson gig for tomorrow’s party anyway.”

“He’s got a whole persona,” said Caroline. “An Emersona.”

“It’s really just a new suit,” said Nicholas, looking sheepish.

“It’s a new _you_ ,” said Caroline, grinning.

Elliot thought abruptly that he didn’t want to go home with Emerson. He wasn’t even sure if he _liked_ Emerson, even though technically Emerson was him half the time.

Maybe that was part of the problem, too, he thought miserably. He didn’t even know if he liked himself at the moment.

“Actually, you know what, never mind,” he said. “I think I’m just going to go home. I mean. To my parents’.”

“Are you sure?” said Nicholas. Elliot nodded.

“Okay,” said Nicholas. “You can change your mind if you need to, though.”

Prior to this podcast, Elliot thought, Nicholas would never have just accepted that Elliot was going back to his parents’ place after dropping a line like _I miss your couch_.  God, he was completely _pathetic_.

He made his excuses to Blake and went back to the apartment over his parents’ garage in a state of shock. There was no Ian Purrtis to greet him, no one to toss him a warm blanket and smooth over the mess he'd made of his life. There was no one to press him against the wall and call him a ridiculous creature and touch him everywhere, over and over, until he was a giant quivering plea for respite.

Also, not that it mattered, but his favorite laptop and most of his suits were at Jonah’s.

Elliot’s phone had no texts except a few from Jane lamenting that her plane had now been delayed overnight. He had almost completely forgotten that the podcast party, the one he was throwing, was the next evening. He probably had, like, last-minute planning stuff to do.

But all he could think of as he fell into bed, exhausted, was that he missed Jonah and he missed Nicholas and he missed his old life, and he thoroughly resented the podcast for ruining everything.

 

Jonah didn’t text him the next day, either, and the deep cold misery coating Elliot’s stomach steadily worsened every time he checked his phone to no avail, which was dumb, because what would Jonah even say to him that he hadn’t already said? Elliot had no idea what to say himself, as he rapidly found out from the dozens of texts he tried to start and wound up deleting throughout the day. Eventually he had to turn his thoughts to the podcast party, because there were still swag bags to be made and party favors to finalize, and although Jane was still delayed in L.A. because of her work thing, there was still a chance she might be able to make the tail end of the party, which meant he had to make it the best party it could possibly be, so Elliot tried to put everything out of his mind and focus on what he did best: aesthetics.

He’d chosen Daedalus for the party because it had a large rooftop bar and was in Harvard Square. When he arrived carrying a barrage of posters and party supplies, a smattering of fans had already lined up out front even though the party didn’t officially start for another half hour. Some of them were wearing what looked like cosplay. One of them, as far as he could tell from having skimmed through most of the episodes, appeared to be cosplaying as Sebastian, and he was talking avidly to someone who looked as though they could have easily passed for a Vaudevillian time traveler.

Elliot took a moment to be grateful for them all, and for Hazel, and for this thing that they’d all managed to build together, because even if the process had somehow turned into a living hell for Elliot personally, it was still, on another level, pretty cool.

The rooftop of Daedalus had been transformed for the party, with the patio cleared away for dancing and most of the inside tables cleared away for chairs for the audience, with the DJ booth and mics at the other end.

Jonah was already there when Elliot arrived; he and Hazel’s boyfriend were going over the evening’s schedule with the DJ.  Elliot proved unable to tear his gaze away from Jonah’s back, so naturally Jonah felt it and turned, and then they froze and stared at each other, because Elliot was completely unprepared for Jonah in black tie, and he’d been saving his own suit hoping Jonah would like it, so they stood there in their respective tailored confections, devouring one another wordlessly.

Elliot tried his best to send Jonah a stare that telepathically ordered him to fly to Elliot’s side and make everything better, but Jonah’s answering look made it equally clear that was far from happening, and after another moment he broke the gaze and returned his attention to the DJ, leaving Elliot feeling stranded and alone in a sea of embarrassing feelings and confusion, and the party hadn’t even started yet and everything was awful.

Hazel and Kate were setting up the swag table. Kate had also brought swag, in the form of signed production scripts, prints of some of the _Time Ravel_ fanart Elliot had commissioned, and something she called BPAL that looked like a Hot Topic nightmare but smelled amazing.

Elliot helped the two of them divvy up all the swag, and then made sure the mics were all set up, and went over the program schedule with Hazel, and he was busy trying to explain to the DJ that just because Hazel had _put_  Iggy on the playlist didn’t mean Iggy had to _stay_ on the playlist when Caroline came in, all smiles in a cheery yellow sundress, and asked, “Where do you want us to hang the _Time Ravel_ poster?” and Elliot realized that a stranger in Nicholas' body was standing next to her holding the banner he’d asked Nicholas to pick up from the printer’s.

Elliot had spent the entire day feeling queasy from unhappiness, so it was entirely absurd that now he looked at Nicholas and suddenly felt hollowed out inside.

Nicholas... Nicholas looked ridiculous. Objectively, he looked—well. A normal person would have probably described him as devastatingly sexy, if Elliot were a normal person and not an apparent bundle of confusion and contradictory emotions. He’d combed his hair back and gelled it so it was nothing like the normal messy med-student look. He had shaved his perpetual days-old scruff and had almost certainly gotten his eyebrows threaded. His suit was a cream-colored safari look, an open jacket draped over an off-white silk shirt with the top two buttons open, and the whole look was so... so put-together and subtly sexual and anti-Nicholas that it took Elliot a moment to realize that he was looking at Nicholas’s _Emersona_ , as Caroline had called it.

it was abruptly too, too much for Elliot. Any second now Nicholas was going to ask him if he liked the suit and Elliot was going to have to lie and congratulate him, Elliot was going to have to _lie_ to Nicholas, no, to _Emerson_ —

“Hey, you okay?” asked Hazel beside him. “It’s hot out here, and you’ve been running around. You should get some water.”

“Oh,” said Caroline, looking alarmed. “Yeah, go sit down, Elliot, we’ll handle all this.”

Elliot swallowed and nodded, grateful for any excuse to distract himself from the giant flashing neon sign in his brain alerting him that Nicholas was changing beyond his comprehension.

He went to the bar and didn’t even bother looking up which pink drinks were on the menu. Instead he ordered a scotch and drank it, and then another, trying to figure out what was happening in his brain. He wasn’t sure whether he was angrier at himself or angrier at Nicholas, which was ridiculous since all Nicholas had done was slick his hair back and buy a new suit, and nothing made sense, and Elliot wanted to go find a hole and lie down in it.

“You sure?” said the bartender when he ordered a third scotch. Elliot nodded.

Someone sat down beside him, and Elliot knew without looking that it was Nicholas.

“Hey,” said Nicholas. Elliot forced himself to look at him, and then he drained the rest of his glass, because he needed to be very drunk very quickly.

“You okay? Kate said you got overheated.”

“I probably raced over here too fast,” Elliot said dully. That was an obvious lie, but Nicholas didn’t call him on it.

“You like my idea for Emerson?” said Nicholas. “Voila, easy disguise.”

“Technically you just combed your hair back and unbuttoned your shirt,” said Elliot.

Nicholas shrugged. “I like it,” he said. “Practice for when I’m a real doctor.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “I should—we should all call you Emerson tonight.”

Nicholas made a flourish. “C’est moi,” he said.

Nicholas ordered an old-fashioned, and the bartender looked between the two of them like he wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with whatever was going on here, and Elliot preemptively tipped him a pair of twenties and stared at him intensely until he got the message and brought him another scotch.

Elliot sat nursing it while Nicholas babbled about his Emerson persona. Emerson was, was shallow and fixed on appearances, Emerson liked things Nicholas didn’t care about, Emerson flirted and seduced and was mysterious and opaque, and it didn’t matter that Emerson was that way because Elliot had helped make him that way, it mattered that Nicholas _wanted_ him that way—that maybe Nicholas thought all this was what he would be growing _into_.

Elliot was wishing Emerson had never been figuratively born when Jonah said heartily from behind him, “If it isn’t Emerson, looking especially dashing. Shall I whisper something in your ear for the shippers?”

Elliot turned and gaped at him, and Jonah actually slid forward to whisper in Nicholas' ear. Nicholas laughed. “As Nicholas, I would say that’s a pretty cheap trick, but as Emerson, I’m totally into it, and I should probably whisper a few things back, wouldn’t you say?”

He leaned in and slipped his arm around Jonah’s shoulder, and some of the fangirls who were trickling in from outside actually squealed and took pictures.

Elliot ordered another scotch.

The bartender said, “You have two in front of you you haven’t even—”

“I’m working on them, and then I’ll need another one,” said Elliot.

Jonah looked at him.

“How many of those have you had?” he asked.

Elliot flashed him a fake smile that he hoped said, _Not nearly enough_.

“You’re not gonna sit here drinking all night,” said Nicholas. “Since when do you even drink scotch?”

“Maybe I’m evolving,” said Elliot sourly.  

“This _is_ your party,” said Jonah. “You’re the Medici patron.” His voice dropped. “All dressed up and looking the part.” His eyes dropped to Elliot’s suit, and Elliot was not about to get frozen in another eye-fucking moment with Jonah with Nicholas sitting right there, so he tore his gaze away and shrugged.

“The party’s about you guys. There’s an adoring public out there ready to eat you all up. Go... be Jemerson.”

Nicholas finished his old fashioned and turned to them. “I’m game if you are,” he said to Jonah. “Want to dance?”

Jonah looked back at Elliot, who downed an entire scotch at once and said broadly, “Be my guest.”

Nicholas slid off the stool and said, “Great, I’ll tell the DJ to get started.”

Jonah watched him go and then turned back to Elliot. “You’re forgetting something,” he said.

Elliot looked at him.

“Most of the time,” Jonah said, “the other half of Jemerson is you.”

“Jonah,” Elliot whispered, and the word hung there between them, and Jonah’s eyes were dark and inscrutable on his face, and for a moment Elliot didn’t understand why Jonah wasn’t _touching_ him, and then Hazel arrived and said, “Elliot! We can’t get the sound system to work properly and some of the swag bags have buttons and some of them do not and also did you ask them to be careful about gluten in at least some of the passed appetizers?”

Elliot looked at Hazel blankly, because Hazel seemed to think that Elliot was going to _deal_ with these things.

“Ah, the life of a Medici patron,” remarked Jonah. “Your work is never done.”

And he slid away to join Nicholas— _Emerson_ —on the dance floor.

  


It was a hot and sticky night, and Elliot drank scotch steadily and tried to do his job, whatever his job was at the moment, but mostly Elliot was failing not to stare at Nicholas and Jonah on the dance floor, and failing not to obsessively check the #TimeRavel hashtag on Twitter, which was currently 100% full of photos of Nicholas and Jonah dancing together.

A random fangirl who was cosplaying as a penguin—the show _was_ set in Antarctica, so penguins were kind of recurring characters—said to Elliot, as if she thought talking to Elliot seemed like a good idea, “So what do you do on the show?”

Elliot gave her a look that he hoped said, _Don’t talk to me_. And then abruptly changed his mind. “Hey. Let me ask you a question.”

“Okay.” She looked pleased to be asked a question.

“Do you ship Jemerson?” Elliot asked, and gestured to Jonah and Nicholas, who had not been more than an arm’s length away from each other for the _entire evening_.

“Well, now I do,” she replied brightly, which was such an _awesome answer_ , Elliot was so glad he’d asked. “I mean, haven’t they been so cute together all night? Also, Emerson’s suit is _fantastic_.”

Emerson’s suit _was_ fantastic. Elliot hated it.

“You don’t think Jonah’s suit is fantastic?” he heard himself ask, because apparently he was an awkward teenager with a crush.

The penguin girl considered. “Yeah, but he looks like he woke up like that,” she said. “Like, he probably wears suits to breakfast.”

Elliot laughed. “You’re not far off.”

She looked at him. “Is he your boyfriend?” Her eyes widened. “Is that why you’re asking if I ship him with Emerson? Oh, god, are you _jealous_?”

“No!” said Elliot. “I mean. We’re not—I mean, we are, but, or we were, but—” He sighed. “Look, have you ever felt like you had an idea of the person you wanted to be with, and that idea was built around the person you’ve spent most of your time looking at, most of your time thinking about, most of your time _being with_ , and yet you suddenly realize that maybe you’ve never actually really seen him, or have really ever _been with him_ at all, and meanwhile there’s this other person who you’ve maybe never been able to fully understand, or get out of your system, and suddenly they’re all you can think about, and you have a chance to be with them, only being with them would mean something _completely different_ than everything you’ve built your life around up til now, because you built your life around a dream of this other person who may not even _exist_.”

“What?” said the penguin girl.

“You’re not very helpful,” Elliot told her, annoyed.

“Well, I mean,” said the penguin girl.

“Okay,” said Caroline gaily, tugging Elliot up by the arm. “You have to forgive our Elliot,” she said to the penguin girl. “He can be a little dramatic.”

“That’s a lie,” Elliot said, as Caroline led him away.

“It is a lie. I’ve never seen you do ‘little’ dramatic. Here.” Caroline handed him water. “Stop drinking.”

“I’m not even a little bit drunk,” said Elliot, and took the water, and glanced out toward Jonah and Nicholas again. They were _slow dancing_. Elliot tried to recall ever seeing Nicholas slow dance with anyone ever before. Was this an Emerson thing? Elliot’s head was such a huge jumble. Nicholas had shown up as Emerson—or was he just Nicholas—or was he just Nicholas playing Emerson—or was he Nicholas playing the Emerson he wanted to be—or the Emerson Elliot had tried to _turn him into_ —or was this Nicholas and it was Elliot who had never seen him as he truly was?

And _Jonah_ , Jonah who was somehow always the most himself when he was playing with public masks like this, Jonah who said he’d always seen through Elliot, who Elliot had always seen through, too, except in all the ways that mattered—Jonah was flirting with Nicholas, laughing with Nicholas, Jonah had his hands slung low on Nicholas’s hips like nothing mattered, like he wanted Nicholas, like he hadn’t just spent two weeks taking Elliot to pieces every night, whispering soft confessions against his lips, learning Elliot’s body like a scholar memorizing a text.

 _I’m not waiting for you_.

“Elliot,” said Caroline, cutting into his thoughts.

“Yeah,” he said, not looking away from the dance floor.

“You’ve done a good job,” Caroline said. “With the podcast and the party and the Patreon and all of it. It’s all been a good scheme, a quality shenanigan.”

There was something about Caroline’s tone that pulled Elliot away from the tableau on the dance floor. He looked at her and said, “Thank you,” slowly and cautiously, because he sensed Caroline had more to say.

“I think,” Caroline said carefully, “you’ve been under a lot of stress. And change. And maybe you should, just, take a break.” She lifted her hand up, her index finger and thumb touching. “A teeny-tiny, eensie-weensie break. From scheming so hard, and overthinking everything, and drinking your non-pink drink, and frowning at everything that comes near you.”

“I’m not—” Elliot denied.

“Take a break,” said Caroline. “Just sit here with me and breathe.” Elliot eyed her, but he dutifully sat without touching any of the most recent row of drinks the bartender had lined up for him. The bartender shot Caroline a grateful glance, and Elliot spared a glare for him, but he tried to do as Caroline asked. She leaned over and squeezed his arm.

“See?” she said. “This is how we do it. We sit, and we take a break, and we breathe, and we get through it.”

And then Nicholas was there, saying, “Get through what?” and leaning past Caroline to pluck a drink off the table they were next to, and Elliot abandoned his breathing exercises and drained the first tumbler of scotch.

“Or you could talk to Nicholas,” Caroline said dryly.

“Shh,” said Nicholas. “Emerson.”

“Sorry,” said Caroline lightly, and then turned, gave Elliot another encouraging squeeze, and left them alone with one meaningful glance at Nicholas.

Nicholas gave Elliot a quizzical look and said hesitantly, “I thought you’d be happier. It’s been a fun night. The fans love it.”

“What makes you think I’m not happy?” Elliot asked. “I’m happy. I’m very happy.”

“Is this because I’ve been monopolizing Jonah on you?”

“Because…” Elliot tried to make those words make sense. It was harder than it ordinarily was. “What?”

“You know it’s all just for the fans, right?” said Nicholas. “Look, he’s free now. I’m gonna go dance with Caroline and he’s obviously dying to dance with you, so stop sulking and go dance with him.”

“What?” said Elliot, feeling like Nicholas had just shoved him off this bar stool. “That’s it, I just... go dance with Jonah with your blessing?”

Nicholas stared at him. “Why wouldn’t you? You—I mean. You just stayed at his house for a week, you kept disappearing off to the guest house with each other last night, you’re obviously having _some kind of thing with Jonah_ even though you’re trying to pretend like you’re not, so just... go have your thing with Jonah.” He turned to the bar and ordered another old fashioned. “And just... leave me out of it,” he muttered.

Elliot stared at him. “Leave you out of it,” he said.

“Yeah, Elliot,” said Nicholas sharply. “I get it. Believe me. I get it. You don’t have to feel guilty, or, worried about my feelings, or me judging you, or whatever the fuck has been keeping you from talking to me about it, but I’m telling you—it’s fine. Things change, people change, we move on.  It’s fine.”

Elliot was still staring at him, unable to form a response, barely able to breathe. “Are you,” he finally choked. “Are you saying you... what _are_ you saying?”

“Oh, my _god_ ,” said Nicholas, downing all of his old fashioned at once.

“No, seriously,” said Elliot. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t care? At all? If I go dance with Jonah, if I go off and have some sort of fling with Jonah?”

“Elliot,” said Nicholas. “Why would it matter if I care or not?”

“What do you mean? Of course it matters.”

“No,” said Nicholas. “It doesn’t. Because _look at you_. You’re obviously falling in love with Jonah.”

Elliot’s jaw fell open.

“And that’s fine, that’s _great_ , I’m happy for you,” Nicholas said. “I don’t understand why you seem so agitated about it.”

Elliot was going to sink into the floor. He was going to slip out of this bar stool and into the woodwork and into the ground and into the abyss.

“I thought,” he heard himself rasp. He sounded feeble. “I thought we were. I thought that you and I were...”

Nicholas turned to him, dawning understanding in his eyes. Elliot swallowed and forced the words out, forced himself to say what he’d been keeping tucked inside of him for years.

“I thought you and I were soulmates,” he said helplessly, fighting to stay in command of his voice. “I thought we were happy and perfect and eventually you’d tell me you loved me and we were going to move to some little doctor’s house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a dog and Ian Purrtis and you would make me coffee in the mornings and I would make you perfectly arranged bento boxes for lunch, and I thought we would be together forever.”

A part of Elliot, some detached sliver that wasn’t currently sinking into the floor with the rest of him, noted that it was interesting to watch all the color bleed out of Nicholas’s face.

“Me, too,” Nicholas said softly. “I thought that, too. But you’ve never once looked at me the way you’ve been looking at Jonah ever since this podcast started. I always... I’d always thought you just didn’t fall for people that way.” He reached out and took Elliot’s hand, and squeezed it. “Turns out you just didn’t fall for me that way.”

Elliot stared at him.

Hazel said, “Emerson? Oh, Emerson!” in a sing-song voice over the microphone.

Neither Elliot nor Nicholas looked away from each other, and that was only partly because neither one of them was actually called Emerson.

“Emerson,” Hazel snapped.

“Oh, look,” said Blake, stepping right in between Elliot and Nicholas as if Elliot was not slowly dying in front of him, and Elliot had no idea when Blake had even shown up to this party. “It’s _Emerson_.”

Nicholas blinked at Blake. “Right. Emerson. That’s me.” He sent Elliot an apologetic look.

“Up to the stage, Emerson,” Blake said, and gave him a little shove toward Hazel.

Elliot watched Nicholas-as-Emerson walk up to the stage, as the party attendants applauded. Jonah was waiting for him and made an elaborate show of bowing over his hand, and the audience laughed.

Blake said to Elliot, “So I was thinking, like, what about a pinwheel?”

Elliot turned to him, startled, feeling like all the wind had been knocked out of him. “What?”

“It’s kind of like cool, laidback art, right? Like, I don’t take myself too seriously, I’m a fun guy to work with, and also I acknowledge the power of the wind.”

“...What?” Eliot tried again.

“You said Jonah likes art,” said Blake.”

“You think Jonah will hire you if you get him a pinwheel,” said Elliot. The universe was full of terrible malevolent gods and they were all taking turns sucker-punching him right at this moment.

“Maybe? I mean, it’s no pukwudgie but, unless you can think of a better scheme? You know him best. So, whip me up me a good scheme for Jonah.”

Elliot looked back toward the makeshift stage area. The entire crew was handing out swag, signing autographs, posing for selfies. Nicholas was smiling at everyone who came his way, looking calm and relaxed and like a guy who hadn’t just told his best friend that they weren’t soulmates after all, and next to him Jonah was charming and smiling and everything Elliot wanted, and Elliot felt heartsick and confused and overwhelmed.

Suddenly Elliot hated this party. Suddenly Elliot didn’t want this party. Suddenly Elliot wanted to be in Nicholas's apartment, on Nicholas's couch, petting Nicholas’s cat. Everything was manageable at Nicholas's place. At Nicholas's apartment, he could have kept on burying all of this, just like he’d always buried all of this, the way Nicholas had apparently buried his feelings for Elliot so deep Elliot hadn’t even known they’d existed until it was suddenly too late for any of it to matter.

But no. Elliot had wanted a shenanigan. And now he would never be able to pretend that he was satisfied with any of that again, all because of this _fucking podcast_.

Elliot said to Blake flatly, “Yeah. I’ll give you a scheme.”

Without really knowing what he was doing, he marched up onstage and grabbed the microphone from Hazel.

“Hi,” he said to the bewildered audience. “‘I’m Elliot. I’m the producer, I run the social media and the patreon. Or really, I’m Emerson. See, none of you know me, but I’m actually the one responsible for this whole thing.”

“Elliot,” said Hazel sharply. Elliot ignored her.

“See, I’m the one who makes Emerson happen, most of the time,” he said. “When you see him interacting with Jonah on social media, when you see him flirting and being cute and doing all the stuff you think is so adorable, that’s not him”—he pointed to Nicholas, who was gaping at him— “that’s usually me, because I’m the social media manager. And because I’m the one Jonah wants to flirt with. Or. Wanted to flirt with, before I fucked it all up.”

“Elliot,” said Nicholas.

“But not just the social media,” said Elliot. “I’m the one who convinced Hazel to give you all the Sebastian arc as a full series. I’m the one who convinced her to make the story about Sebastian and the Mysterious Man falling in love. Hazel’s boyfriend writes down everything I do, I think because he’s trying to base Sebastian off of me. And that speech you all loved so much from ep 5, the Mysterious Man’s speech to Sebastian? That was about me. That was my speech. It was from Jonah to me, only—”

“ _Elliot_.”

Jonah’s voice was hard, and Elliot turned to him and found them all staring at him, wearing mutual expressions of horror. Jonah looked livid, and hurt, and _disappointed in him_ , and Elliot knew suddenly, beyond any doubt, that he would give anything, do anything, to take that expression off Jonah’s face—and that he’d just fucked up completely.

Shocked, he handed the mic back to Hazel and stepped away.

“Er,” said Hazel. “Thank you, Elliot.” She sent him a glare full of daggers, and Elliot realized the whole audience was awkwardly silent and tense. And Jonah—Jonah, once again, wasn’t looking at him at all.

Elliot’s stomach plunged. He fled.

  
  


He found a spot on the pavement in the alcove tucked at the darkest edge of the Daedalus rooftop, where the air was slightly cooler and fresher, and where the sounds of Jonah and Nicholas reading the final episode of the podcast for the crowd, and the sounds of the audience eating it up, and the sounds of all the people having much better nights than he was were somewhat easier to ignore.

He was thinking abysmal thoughts of Jonah, and how he’d fucked everything up between them, probably for good, when Caroline approached and sat down next to him. He looked at her wordlessly, and she held out a cigarette to him before lighting her own. He took it, pathetically grateful for the gesture.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Mr. Disinvited-from-the-Toastmasters.” Elliot sent her a look, which she returned wryly.

“What were you thinking?” she asked.

Elliot said dully, “I wasn’t. I just...” _I was in shock_. He looked at her. “Caroline,” he said. “Have you really been watching Nicholas and I do this fucking thing that we did for all these years?”

“It’s been like stage directing _Noises Off_ but every character is you,” she said.

“ _Nice_ ,” he said. “I’m sorry. That must be a sucky position to be in.”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “That is sweet of you to say. Incredibly narcissistic of you to think I’d still be hung up on a relationship that ended years ago with someone who’s since become a better friend to me than he ever was a boyfriend. But sweet.”

“Did you know? At the time?”

Caroline cast him a careful look. “Well,” she said. “I thought it was because you were in love with Nicholas the whole time, but now I think it’s because you were in love with... someone else.”

Elliot laughed, a little hysterically. “Dick move on my part, either way,” he said. “You deserved better.”

Caroline tilted her head and scrutinized him. “I know,” she said. “But it’s not really your fault. You didn’t know.”

“I didn’t _know_ ,” he said. “How did I not know?”

Caroline raised an eyebrow. “I think you were pretty content not to know.”

“I don’t,” Elliot said, taking an uneven drag on his cigarette. “I think there’s a lot I don’t know. Or a lot I pretend not to know.” He exhaled. “You know, I don’t even know if I like pink drinks.” She snorted. “No, really. I drink them all the time because they’re _aesthetically appealing_ but I don’t even know if I _want_ them. And meanwhile I—I pretend not to like things I secretly love. I have seen _Les Miserables_ a ridiculous number of times. I used to secretly lip sync to the concept album of _Starlight Express_. I love _Matilda so much_. I saw _Jersey Boys_ _twice_. I’m not even a snobby musical theatre fan, I am a clichéd, cheesy secretly-loves-everything musical theatre fan. I’m a fucking musical theatre nerd.”

“This breakdown you’re having right now,” said Caroline. “Is it contagious?”

“I could fucking win a musical theatre quiz night with Jonah as the only other teammate,” said Elliot. “Fuck, I actually secretly love quiz nights. And another thing. I don’t even think I like my job. I spend more time making fun of my job than actually doing my job. What am I even doing?  What the fuck. What the _fuck_.”

“You’re going to be upset you didn’t make everyone at this party sign an NDA,” Caroline said.

“I love Jane Austen,” said Elliot. “I have watched the BBC’s production of _Pride and Prejudice_ several times and you know what? It’s the best one. Colin Firth is the only Darcy. I will literally fight people on this. Don’t challenge me. And even though Emma Thompson contributed uncredited changes to the 2005 script, Joe Wright’s maudlin tone completely sucks all the whimsy and satirical lightheartedness out of Austen’s comedy of manners.”

“How long can we keep this up?” asked Caroline. “What are your thoughts on Bernie Sanders?”

“The point,” said Elliot, “is that I know these things about me and I pretend like I don’t know these things and I pretend like I’m not that person because—because of _shenanigans_.”

“I don’t pretend to understand any of this,” Caroline said, “but I have a feeling it’s going to be okay.” She hesitated. “If you can convince Hazel and Jonah to ever speak to you again.”

“Is—is it bad?”

She boggled at him. “You’re really asking that after you got up in front of an audience and took credit for the whole podcast away from Hazel _and_ outed Jonah as having feelings for you to a bunch of strangers?” He winced. “Not to mention mortifying Nicholas by pointing out that he was sharing the role of Emerson.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “Actually, you’re right, it was all pretty bad, you should probably feel awful.”

He sighed and tipped his head back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes, and his head only swam a little bit, which either meant that it was a good thing he was coming out of his scotch-induced haze or that he desperately needed more scotch.

Probably he desperately needed more scotch. Sobering up was making all of this ten times worse.

He looked at Caroline. “You’re falling for each other, aren’t you?” he asked finally. “You and Nicholas.” And that, that was another thing he’d been pretending not to know.

She looked at him, ducked her head, then ran a hand over her face and nodded.

Elliot supposed that should have sealed it, the final confirmation that things between him and Nicholas were completely, totally over.

Except that he was still so stuck on that _look_ on Jonah’s face that it barely registered.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Of course it is. You’ll be perfect together.”

She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “Elliot,” she said. “We were going to talk to you about it after the party. He was. I know it’s been a weird time for all of us.”

He had to laugh at that, at the complete understatement of it all.

Caroline squeezed his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Jonah really, really cares about you, I think. And you know that Nicholas does.”

He looked at her miserably. She patted him on the arm and stood up, pulling him to his feet.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going to come apologize to Hazel,” she said. “And then you’re going to help me find another cigarette.”

“Those things’ll kill ya,” he said, but he gave her a hug and let her drag him back out onto the patio. The party had mostly disbanded; the swag bags had all been given away, and the DJ was packing up his equipment. He let Caroline pull him cautiously towards the circle of Hazel, Jonah, and Hazel’s boyfriend, unsure what he could possibly say to make things better.

Instead, as he approached, Hazel turned and saw him and waved her phone in his face. “Elliot,” she snapped, “this is important, I need you to call someone, and I need you to not fuck this up.”

“Now?” Elliot asked, startled.

“Yes, now,” said Hazel. “This is very important. This is the _most important thing_ to ever happen, so if you can actually be an adult for once and not screw over this podcast that all your friends have worked very hard on for months, I’d really fucking appreciate it, okay?”

Elliot glanced over to Jonah. He was watching them, completely unreadable. “Okay,” he said. “Who do you want me to call?”

“It’s a _producer_ ,” said Hazel. “A producer of _podcasts_. He’s with Wanderlust New England.”

“That’s the network that does all the fiction podcasts people aren’t sure are real or not,” Elliot said.

Hazel said impatiently, “Yes, Elliot, I _know_. Check your phone, he sent an email to the podcast inbox saying he’s going to be in Boston tomorrow and would like to meet with us about potentially joining the network. He wants you to call him. I don’t know why he wants _you_ to call him but go, call him before it gets to be insultingly late.”

“Don’t we already produce this podcast?” said Elliot.

“Yes, but they produce _real_ podcasts,” Hazel said.

“I wasn’t aware our podcast was fake,” said Elliot. “I’ve been through a hell of a lot for a fake podcast.”

“These people have _money_ ,” Hazel said. “They could _pay us_. And we could do _amazing things_ with Sebastian. And for some reason, they want to talk to _you_. So please talk to them and do what you do and sell the podcast and get us a meeting. Please?”

Elliot felt himself go red. “Sure,” he bit out, digging out his own phone and sending a quick text to the producer. “I’m sorry. By the way.”

Hazel scoffed. “Whatever, just don’t screw this up for us,” she muttered.

Elliot turned and looked at her incredulously.

“Do you even know what this producer is going to want to talk about?” he asked. “He’s going to want to talk audience engagement, platform distribution, analytics, traffic, and budget costs. He’s going to want to know whether we’ve been in talks with potential sponsors or whether we’re privately financing the podcast. Do you know how many plays we get per episode through each of our Android apps? Do you know what podcatchers we _even use_? Do you know what metadata we give and receive to iTunes every time we upload an episode? Do you know how much it’s costing to produce this party tonight and whether we can recoup any of that cost through Patreon or platform-side advertising? Do you even know if we _have_ been in talks with sponsors?”

Hazel started to answer but he cut her off.

“No,” he said. “You don’t. And the reason you don’t is because _I am your fucking producer_. You made knowing that _my job_ , and I have done my job, I have been superb, I am the Muhammad Ali of follower-gains over a six-week average in the life of a new podcast, and _that_ is why this person wants to talk to me.”

“Elliot—” said Hazel, but this time Hazel’s boyfriend placed a hand on her arm.

“Just drop it,” he said, and she wrenched away from him.

“What? No,” she said. “You _always_ take his side. You’ve let him railroad me again and again in every decision we’ve made since we started. Elliot wants to cast Nicholas, so we cast Nicholas, Elliot wants to change the entire nature of the story and you’re all for it, Elliot wants to do social media, you think it’s a great idea, Elliot disrupts rehearsal, you want him to stay, Elliot wants to tweak plot points on social media without getting the approval of the freaking _writer_ and the freaking writer is like, go right ahead! Does anyone here even still remember that this podcast was _my idea_?”

“Well, I think,” Hazel’s boyfriend started, and Elliot interrupted:

“No, she’s right, Tim,” he said. “I’ve always known what your name is, by the way. You constantly undermine her. I also constantly undermine her, and, Hazel, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. We’re both assholes. But _I_ undermined you because I wanted to help you make this thing as good as it could be. And I _did_. Casting Nicholas was the best idea. Making the podcast revolve around a single storyline was what made it a hit. I am a _great_ producer. But you? You’re her fucking _boyfriend_. What is your problem?”

Tim’s mouth fell open.

“Wait,” said Elliot. “I know. It’s that you never fucking stop _writing about me_.”

“Well, it’s not actually about—”

“No, it is. I was an asshole tonight, and I’m sorry. Honestly, I’m sorry and I shouldn’t have done it. But it’s true, you constantly spy on us and then use the stuff we say for material in the podcast, and it’s kind of infuriating.  I mean, do you have to write down _every single word I say_?”

They all stared at him. And then his phone rang.

“Excuse me,” Elliot said politely. “I’m going to get you a meeting with this producer, because that is my job, and I am fucking excellent at it.” And he stalked off to talk to the goddamn producer.

“Hi,” he said. “Hope this isn’t a bad time.”

“Are you kidding,” said the producer. “No one sleeps in this business.”

“You’re telling me,” said Elliot darkly.

The podcast producer was going to be in Boston the next day and wanted to meet with the podcast team to discuss potential network opportunities. Elliot arranged a time and rang off. Nicholas was sitting at the bar, talking intently to Caroline. Of course. Hazel and Tim were now off to the side, apparently arguing bitterly.

“We’re meeting tomorrow at noon,” he interrupted them. Hazel looked at him coldly.

“That’s great,” she said. “Thank you. And now please make sure you _don’t_ come to the meeting tomorrow.”

“What?” he said.

“I mean it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have to stay up all night digging into our analytics myself but it would be better than having you show up and take credit for all my work, Elliot.”

He stared at her, stricken. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t what, do what you just did tonight, in front of all those people?” She looked close to tears.

“No, Hazel, please, I’ve got charts and data on all of that stuff,” he blurted. “If you go into the network meeting without all your analytics and traffic info it’ll be a waste of a meeting.”

“I don’t. _Care_.” Hazel sniffled. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I would rather risk blowing this giant opportunity than be in the same place with you right now.”

He took a step back, stunned. He hadn’t just been a giant fucking asshole, he realized. He hadn’t just jeopardized any chance he had with Jonah.

He’d jeopardized the success of the entire podcast.

He stared at her, devastated, and then chanced a glance at Jonah, who was still watching them silently. His face was hard and impassive, and Elliot heard all the stern words he wasn’t saying as clearly as if Jonah were reading him a lecture.

He was exactly the liability Jonah had warned Hazel he would be.

“I’ll stay away,” he said helplessly to Hazel. “I promise. Hazel. I’m so sorry.”

“Good,” said Hazel. And then she turned her back on him.

One by one, the others left, some throwing him wary looks on their way out. He stood, frozen in place, unsure what to do, until finally he realized he still had party cleanup to do. He went mechanically through the motions, gathering streamers and trash and swag bags, putting away folding chairs, and tipping all the waiters.

Before he left, Nicholas wandered over. “Hey,” he said.

Elliot said, “Hey,” and, “Sorry about earlier,” and kept folding chairs.

“Are you?” Nicholas asked.

Elliot looked at him. “Caroline told me.”

“Yeah,” said Nicholas. He looked at Elliot for a moment. “Hey,” he said. “This is nobody’s fault.”

Elliot nodded. “Everything’s going to change,” he said. “Everything already is.”

“Well, yeah.” Nicholas stuck his hands in his pockets. “But we’re still going to be best friends. You know that, right? Even if what you did tonight was super shitty.”

“I’m sorry,” Elliot said again. He looked down. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“Hey,” Nicholas said. “Stop. We had something amazing. I wouldn’t trade all those nights of you sleeping on my couch for anything. Although in retrospect that was completely fucked up.”

Elliot laughed, had to laugh, and Nicholas laughed, and then he wrapped his arms around Elliot and hugged him, and held on for a long time.

And then he left with Caroline.

At some point, Jonah joined Elliot to help drag all the tables back out onto the patio, and Elliot realized he must have stayed behind after everyone else had gone.

They worked silently together for a moment before Elliot ventured, “Jonah, I—”

“Shut up,” Jonah said.

So Elliot shut up.

They put out a few more tables and arranged a few more chairs, before Jonah spoke again.

“Nicholas told me about the conversation you'd had just before he came onstage,” he said. “I know it's a lot.” He sighed. “I thought... I thought I could see you changing, and maturing, and... you kept surprising me. I wonder if I just kept letting you surprise me, telling myself you were different, because I still wanted you so much. I wanted you, so badly, to be different.”

“I am different,” Elliot said. He took a breath. “When we're together, everything is different.”

Jonah looked at him and slowly shook his head. “Even if I could even think of being with someone who's just hurt and humiliated my best friend,” he said, “I can't convince myself it wouldn't be more of the same every time you got panicked or hurt or upset. A stage crash, a dramatic outburst, a moment of recklessness that winds up hurting the people around you.”

“What can I do?” Elliot asked miserably. “What can I do to convince you that's not who I am?”

Jonah looked at him for a long time, so long Elliot nearly squirmed beneath the heat of his gaze. Finally, Jonah answered him.

“You can grow the fuck up,” he said, and left the bar.

From the roof, Elliot watched him walk to the curb and get in the nearest cab, and then Elliot realized abruptly that he was cold and shaking all over. Shivering, he dug out his phone and turned it back on. He had all kinds of texts, which he swiped away before reading because he wasn’t equipped to deal with them just then. Instead, he called Jane.

She answered, sounding sleepy, and Elliot blurted, “I think I may have fucked up everything, what do I do?”

There was a pause, and Jane said, “Elliot. It is after one in the morning. I just got off a five-hour red-eye after a work week from hell, no one can stop texting me for two minutes, and apparently we have some sort of last-second meeting in the morning? I’m exhausted. I’m sorry, I really am, but I can’t do the thing right now.”

“What thing?”

“The Elliot... drama thing,” said Jane. “The part where you freak out over something random and stage a giant scene and piss everyone off and then one of us has to tell you how to fix it.”

“This is serious,” Elliot said. “Jonah broke up with me. Nicholas and Caroline are seeing each other. Hazel banned me from the podcast meeting. And I think I just—”

“Oh, I know,” said Jane. “I saw the texts. You do not want to know what Hazel texted me ten minutes ago. And I’m sorry, I can’t do it right now, I’ve just come off working sixty hours in four days trying to fix a ridiculous code repo nightmare while getting mansplained to by assholes because Silicon Valley is a sexist cesspool and I’m exhausted and tired and I just, I can’t do it right now.”

“Oh,” said Elliot. “Sorry.” And then, “But—that sounds like a nightmare? You never said. Why didn’t you say if Google was so awful?”

Jane laughed, actually _laughed_ at him. “Wow,” she said. “Wow, Elliot, what would I have said? ‘Hey, Elliot, one of the other coders got pissed at me for reverting his code today and called me an FOB like we were both back in high school!’ What would you have said? Would you even know what that means? Or what it’s like in a shitty tech job where men talk over you and ignore you and constantly undermine you and white people treat you like you’re either a grunt there to take orders and do shit work or you’re an invader about to steal all their jobs?” She laughed again. “Yeah, no. You wouldn’t know. You’ve sure never asked me about any of that. I don’t actually know if you ever _would_ ask me if I weren’t suddenly not there to help you out with all your dumb schemes and keep everything from blowing up in your face.”

Elliot couldn’t move; he was going to be stuck in one place, shocked to the core for the rest of eternity. “That’s—that’s not true,” he said. “I ask, I—”

“ _Do you_?” Jane said. “Because it doesn’t feel like it. Because right now I have all these texts from my friends asking me whether I think they should ever talk to you again and I don’t know if I have a reason for them because I don’t know if you’ve ever seen _any_ of us as real people and not side characters in the Stage Play of Elliot.”

“ _Jane_ ,” said Elliot, stricken.

“Sorry,” said Jane, not sounding sorry at all. “I can’t help you out of whatever this is. Like, I know you've never had to deal with anything more difficult than making sure your suit matches the drink you order at cocktail hour, but whatever the hell just happened here? You’re just going to have to deal with it on your own.” She sighed. “I’ll just—we’ll talk in the morning.”

And she hung up on him.

After what felt like hours Elliot grabbed the nearest cab and left Daedalus. He curled into himself and let his head thud against the jostling cab window and stared outside at the passing pavement.

Everything was so _fucked up_. How had he never realized it before? Had he really been in that much denial?

Jonah had never talked to him the way he'd talked to Elliot tonight. He'd never been that cold, that icy, that serious, not even when they'd fought that day in the Black Box. And then Jane...

Elliot made himself look at the texts he’d gotten, just in case any of them were from Jonah or Jane. None were.

Instead, he read, _Tonight was fucked-up even for you,_ from Blake.

And from Kate—who had never texted him before, even, _You really hurt Hazel’s feelings tonight. She can’t stop talking about it._ _I think she’s more upset at you than Tim_.

Then she added, _And_ _apparently Hazel and Tim are broken up now, so that should tell you something._

And on the group thread, a long text from Hazel sent out to everyone reading, _I know we’re all rightly upset about tonight’s events but let’s focus on the positive—we threw a great party for the fans and we have a super-important meeting tomorrow. So I know it’s hard but please everyone try and assemble early tomorrow and think positive happy thoughts!_

 _Except for you, Elliot. I think we’ll probably be fine without you_.

And finally, from Hazel herself, a text with only a single image:  

Elliot stared at it, at that stupid trophy emoji, for what felt like forever. Finally, he sent her a reply:

 _I’m sorry_.

He stared at it after he’d sent it, wondering how a text could seem so hollow and inadequate and whether it would read as heartfelt and mournful or flippant or glib or insincere. And then he sent it again, to the group thread: _I’m sorry, everyone. Best of luck in the morning._

After a few more minutes he stopped dicking around and texted Jonah.

_I’m sorry. For all of it. And especially for taking so long to realize who I want. And how much._

He sent it off and then stared at his phone hoping for a response until his eyes started to burn.

He didn’t sleep.

  
  
  


In the morning when the hour was still ungodly but the sunlight was at least peaking through the curtains, Elliot more or less gave up on pretending to sleep and stumbled downstairs to his parents’ kitchen to raid the pantry. Exhaustion probably made him noisier than he should have been because his mother padded downstairs while he was staring at the refrigerator blearily trying to decide whether he deserved to be able to pour milk on his frosted flakes or whether assholes like him only deserved to eat plain unadorned cereal forever.

 _“Elliot?”_ His mother squinted at him like he’d grown two heads. “I heard a noise, I thought you were a rat.”

“It me,” said Elliot dully.

“You look awful.” She tipped her head down so she could look at him over the top of his glasses. “What have you done?”

“What?” He looked down at himself and realized that he hadn’t actually changed clothes from the night before; he was sitting at his mom’s kitchen table eating kid’s cereal in a rumpled dress shirt and tie.

He slumped down on the table.

“Did you and Jonah have a fight?” his mom asked, and it occurred to him that his mother apparently thought he was always having fights with his non-boyfriends.

“Oh, _honey_ ,” said his mom, and she came over and leaned down to give him a hug. He tucked his head against her waist and hugged back.

“You must really like him,” she said.

“I do,” Elliot said woefully.

“Was it a fight over Nicholas?” she asked.

“ _Mom,_ ” he said indignantly.

“Well, I’m just saying,” she said. “You and Nicholas were in that strange pattern for such a long time. It seems like the kind of thing a new boyfriend might freak out over.”

“Jonah didn’t freak out over that,” Elliot said. “Jonah doesn’t really freak out over things.”

“He sounds good for you, then,” his mother said wryly.

“He told me I needed to grow up,” Elliot said.

His mother considered this. “Well, do you?” she said.

Elliot nodded mournfully. “I fucked everything up.”

“Hmm,” said his mother. “Have you considered that maybe this fight you had is good? Maybe it _is_ a good opportunity for you to grow. Maybe it’s even a chance for you to get out and see new people, do new things.”

 _I don’t want new people_ , thought Elliot. _I don’t want new things_. He wanted Jonah, with his sharp smiles and sharper eyes, and the genial flamboyance and cryptic observations and endless charm that all slipped into hours of thoughtful conversation and seriousness whenever they were alone together. He wanted Jonah.

And not just Jonah, he realized. He didn’t _want_ new people. It wasn’t just that his friends were close and familiar. His friends were great. He thought of all the times he’d spent mocking Blake’s parties even though he _loved_ Blake’s parties, all the times he’d spent belittling Blake even though Blake unfailingly made him laugh and unfailingly paid attention to everybody, was nice to everybody, even if he was kind of a sociopath.

He thought of all the times he’d treated Hazel’s ideas for the podcast as if they were dumb and uninspired when the truth was he’d _loved_ listening to the adventures of Sebastian and the Mysterious Man, loved the worldbuilding and the suspense and the drama in spite of himself. And he’d taken all the credit for promoting and building a fanbase for a show that could have done that on its own without him, because it was just that good. Hazel and Tim worked hard and they had been gracious to him even when he’d mocked them both and torn down their ideas.

Kate he barely knew, but she seemed quite honestly lovely, and he’d spent plenty of weeks sitting next to her during podcast recordings with nothing to say to her, and Elliot didn’t even know _why_. Everyone loved Kate, and objectively, he knew she was sweet and funny and beloved by, like, everybody.

And suddenly, it seemed so _dumb_ that Elliot had wanted to remain on the outside of that circle of love. What was his _problem_?

He thought of Caroline and Jane, and what he would do if he lost either of their friendships, and felt ill all over again.

Whatever was happening between him and Jonah, it would have to wait. Jonah had been right to walk away last night. Even if he managed to earn Jonah’s forgiveness, nothing Elliot could have with Jonah would mean anything if he couldn’t fix everything else he’d broken within their circle of friends.

“People aren’t like an Etch-A-Sketch, mom,” he said. “You can’t just erase your old relationships and start the drawing over.”

“Did you ever own an Etch-A-Sketch?” said his mom. “Did they even make Etch-A-Sketches when you were little?”

“It’s just a metaphor,” said Elliot mournfully, and then his phone buzzed, and he looked down, and read:

 _Hey, I’m outside. I hope your parents like donuts_.

Elliot bolted for the door and there, stepping away from an Uber, was Jane, holding a drink carrier full of donuts and coffee, looking sleepy but every bit Jane, and Elliot went to her and took the drink carrier and put it down on the stoop and hugged her and hugged her and hugged her.

Jane said, “Okay, we have done a lot of hugging lately,” but awkwardly hugged him back

“I love you so much,” Elliot said, squeezing tighter and hoping she wouldn’t notice he was basically crying into the wool of her favorite Louis Vuitton jacket. “You are my best friend and I love you and I’m so sorry for ever making you feel like a side character in someone else’s drama or like I wouldn’t understand what you were going through or like you couldn’t tell me even if I didn’t understand. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” said Jane. “I was kind of harsh last night. It was just a lot.”

“I broke everything,” said Elliot.

“Hey,” said Jane. She pulled back and looked into his face. “You haven’t broken this. And I’m sorry I told you that you’d have to fix things on your own, because let’s face it, we’re in this together, compadre.”

“I do have to fix things on my own,” said Elliot. “But you can help me strategize, because you are completely the best strategist in the universe.”

“Let’s just get the drinks,” said Jane brusquely, but a little bit pink with pleasure nonetheless, and that was how Elliot spent the morning with Jane and his mom and his dad, devising a game plan for how he was going to unbreak everything over battle nutrients of iced coffee and Union Square donuts.

  
  
  
  
  


Elliot knew Hazel didn’t want to talk to him—Elliot didn’t blame her because _he_ didn’t even want to talk to himself at the moment but he was stuck with himself—but he also knew that he had all of the information Hazel needed for her meeting with the podcast producer, all in beautiful presentation format ready to be used, and he wanted Hazel to have a fantastic meeting with the podcast producer, and he didn’t know how to tell her that without sounding obnoxiously like _without me, you will fail at all things_.

Elliot wasn’t sure if he knew how to communicate with people without sounding obnoxious. He would have liked to ask Nicholas about this, because Nicholas would know and Nicholas would tell him and Nicholas would be gentle about it and Nicholas would be _fond_ , except that Nicholas was probably currently having a lie-in with Caroline, and they both deserved to have a morning away from Elliot and all his drama.

And so Elliot settled for just being as straightforward as possible and texting Hazel, _I’m sorry again. I don’t mean to be obnoxious but I have a presentation for you to use at the meeting, and we could meet for a quick coffee and I could walk you through it so you have it for later?_

Elliot sent the text and then ducked himself into a freezing cold shower that was meant to be as icy and unforgiving as the real world he’d somehow created for himself, and when he got out of the shower and pulled on his oldest pair of jeans and his oldest t-shirt and didn’t bother to brush his hair, there was a reply from Hazel. _No coffee, but I’ll meet you to get the presentation. Government Center_.

Government Center, thought Elliot. Hazel was punishing him by making him meet her at the least aesthetic place in Boston.

His parents and Jane were where he had left them, in his parents’ kitchen, over the detritus of brunch, seriously discussing entrepreneurship and tax strategies.

His mother said, “You look undramatic. It’s a good look.”

Elliot ignored that. “I’m meeting Hazel. I have podcast stuff I have to give to her.”

Jane looked at her watch. “You’re meeting her now? The meeting’s not for hours.”

Elliot shook his head. “I’m not going to the meeting, obviously. This is Hazel’s moment of triumph—this is all your moments of triumph—I’m just going to hand off my information and be done.”

Jane regarded him for a moment. Then she said, “Have you called a Lyft?”

“I might take the T,” said Elliot.

Jane said, “Stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself and call a Lyft. I’ll walk you down the driveway to wait for it.” Jane looked at Elliot’s parents and said, “I’ll be right back and then we’ll finish talking about regulation versus innovation,” and then she basically shoved Elliot outside.

Elliot called himself a Lyft.

Jane settled in for a clear lecture. “You’re probably right not to go to the meeting. You’d just be a distraction, and this is important to everyone, and they don’t need that.”

“Exactly.”

“But I know you, Elliot,” Jane said. “You get scared of how much you care about things, and so you focus on the aesthetic of those things, because then you can pretend so easily that you care less. You don’t have to love any _thing_ if you can just claim to be loving, or judging, the thing’s aesthetic. And we both know that’s why it took you so long to admit that you had feelings for Jonah.”

Elliot sighed.

“So,” said Jane. “The truth is you care about the podcast. You care about the podcast, and you care about Hazel, and that’s why you feel so fucking miserable right now, so let the fact that you _care_ about both of these things inform what you do—not whether what you do will look good or make you the center of attention.”

“That’s... I think I can do that,” said Elliot.

“Good,” said Jane. “And I know you just made the entire podcast about you, but don’t switch to the other extreme and act like a martyr because you’ve been shut out of it for the moment—because, a, you deserve it, and b, when you do that, you’re still making everything all about you, you know.”

“To be fair, the podcast kind of _was_ all about me,” Elliot said, because clearly his relationship with the podcast was very complex.

“You self-centered narcissist,” Jane said.

“That’s redundant,” said Elliot.

“The podcast was about a _much better version_ of you, and the fact that you’ve missed that point is a vitally important one.” She took a breath. “What did Jonah say to you afterwards?”

Elliot stilled and looked down the street and wished very violently for his Lyft to show up. “He was mad,” he said. “Does it even really matter?”

“He’s the only one who didn’t text me about you,” Jane said. “So I texted him to just be like, ‘What did Elliot do? Are you doing any damage control?”

Elliot looked at Jane. His Lyft was pulling up, but suddenly this was no longer a conversation he wanted to escape but one he wanted to know much more about. “What did he say?”

“He said it was your mess,” Jane said.

Elliot stood by his Lyft, cold in the bright summer sunshine, and said, “I’m going to fix this,” because it was unacceptable to think that he wouldn’t.

  
  
  


Hazel was clearly in defensive mode, her arms crossed protectively over her chest, like she expected Elliot to run at her wielding weapons of mass emotional destruction. Elliot winced and took a deep breath and said, “Hazel, I was completely, 100 percent a jackass last night, and there was no excuse for it, and I should never have undermined you, I should never have tried to take over the podcast like I did, I just—it was all wrong. I was all wrong.”

He paused to gauge her reaction; she was staring at him narrowly, so he forged ahead. “I want to make sure you have all the data you need to make your presentation this afternoon, because it’s your presentation, it should have been you getting all the information I had the whole time.”

“Yes,” Hazel said flatly. “It is my presentation. And yes, you should have been giving me all of the data the whole time.”

Elliot nodded.

Hazel looked at him, then exhaled and looked away. “Tim and I broke up,” she said.

Elliot blanched, started to speak, but she cut him off. “No, it wasn’t because of what you said. It’s not like you were wrong. It was just, a lot of things. But what you said, the way you acted—”

“I know,” Elliot said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m—if you want to fire me from the podcast, go ahead. Just—you know. Let me make it up to you, as your friend.”

Hazel looked at him. “Are we friends?” she said, and her lips twisted, as though she were blinking back tears, and Elliot abruptly felt awful, more awful than he had felt last night when Jonah was telling him to grow up, more awful even than when Jane was yelling at him.

“Hey,” he said. She waved him away.

“I just—you know, when I invited you to help out, I hoped I’d finally get to impress you for once,” she said. Elliot’s jaw dropped. “I thought maybe it would give us a chance to get to know and understand one another a little better.”

“I—I was trying to impress _you_ ,” he said. “You acted like—I always thought you didn’t think I had a real job, and you didn’t think I was as creative as any of your performing arts friends since I had gone into business. I wanted to make you take me seriously.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You acted like Jonah and Kate and me, like we were narcissistic dorks with no taste. And Tim—obviously you know how you treated Tim.”

Elliot grimaced. “Fuck,” he said. “Okay, I am genuinely weirded out by Tim. Tim is, like, that’s some _Stranger Beside Me_ shit.” Hazel let out a bark of laughter at this, and then covered her mouth and looked guilty. Elliot said, more gently, “But you’re right. I think... I think I acted that way because it gave me an excuse to keep some... distance.”

“Distance,” repeated Hazel. She blinked. “You mean from Jonah?”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “I think so. I wasn’t... dealing with my feelings for him very well.”

Hazel lifted her eyebrows. “You should probably tell that to Jonah.”

Elliot winced before he could help it. He still had no idea how he was going to talk to Jonah, let alone go about fixing things.

“If you’re really serious about him,” said Hazel. “Which I have a hard time believing you are, frankly—you need to make sure he knows it. I know Jonah comes off as super confident, but he’s never been fully convinced you want him the way he wants you. He nursed his crush on you for _years_. He didn’t tell anyone, not even me, and he tells me everything. I finally had to pry it out of him after he moved out of the Eggplant. Right before he went off to repertory, he told me.”

“Jonah knows how much I want him,” Elliot insisted, staving off a stab of hurt at the idea that Jonah might have left Boston partly in order to get over him. “He has to.” Surely the past two weeks together had made that abundantly clear.

“It’s not about quantity,” said Hazel. “It’s—look, Jonah hates drama, and he hates getting caught up in _your_ drama specifically, so right now he’s probably kicking himself twice as hard, both for getting tangled up in you after he’d tried to move on once, and for getting caught up in your drama more than ever.”

“I know,” said Elliot, “and I’m going to fix it. Somehow.”

“You can fix it by wanting him _better_ ,” Hazel said. “Jonah showed he wants you by letting you stay with him for a week and letting you disrupt his rehearsals and telling you when you were being a jackass. You showed you want him by lying to him about your relationship with another man and then staging a tantrum where you publicly exposed his feelings for you. Lots of people want Jonah. You’re the only one who turned wanting Jonah into a trainwreck.”

“Oh,” said Elliot, mortified.

“So turn it into something better,” said Hazel. “That’s really all he wants.”

Suddenly the concept of ‘grow the fuck up’ seemed a thousand times clearer: _want Jonah better._

“I can do that,” he blurted. “I know Jonah. I know him _so well_ , Hazel. I just... spent a lot of time willfully misunderstanding him. I can want him better. I can turn wanting him into, into a smooth Amtrak ride all the way to Manhattan. I will.”

Hazel looked at him, and then said, sounding exasperated, “Elliot, you don’t have to defend your relationships to me.”

“No, I do,” said Elliot, “Because I can’t fix anything with Jonah if I don’t fix anything with you, and I can’t fix anything with you if you don’t believe that I’m not going to hurt Jonah.”

She crossed her arms, looking unconvinced, and Elliot blurted, “Look. Hazel. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole and I undermined you and I mocked Tim and I ignored Kate and I was absolutely horrible to Jonah, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care about you, because I do. You have great ideas. You work so hard, you always work so hard, and you always know what to do, and you’re fun to hang out with even though you’re like 80 times more mature than the rest of us, and you have decent taste, and you’re basically like the Hillary of our little band of moderates, like, you work your ass off and then some asshole dude comes along and takes all the credit, but you’re still just focused on doing what needs to get done because you’re the real hero, and I think that’s honestly amazing. You’re amazing.”

“Oh,” said Hazel. “Well. That’s.”

“And I _love_ this podcast,” said Elliot. “This podcast is great, it’s the best idea you’ve ever had. I love Sebastian and the Mysterious Man and I love that you dedicate so much attention to making them feel real even though we can’t see them, and I want you to know that I think your idea for one-off episodes was a great one, and I think you should do some anthology episodes for the second season, and that you should write them, not Tim.”

“Huh,” said Hazel.

“Also,” he said, “I don’t think you needed my help at all to turn _Time Ravel_ into what it’s become, but I’m really, really happy that you let me help out anyway, because I just—I really love it. I love interacting with the fans. I love reblogging all the fanart and seeing the fanfic and deleting dozens of annoying tumblr asks about whether Emerson and Jonah are shagging and i just, it’s been really nice.”

He paused, and Hazel was staring at him like she’d never seen him before, and he definitely wasn’t going to send her into the meeting all sniffly and red-eyed, so he thought quickly about how much fun Jane would be making of him right now and collected himself and said, brusquely, “I know you only asked me to help as a favor to Jane, so I’d have some sort of new shenanigan to occupy myself with after she went away. I meant what I said last night, I am _really_ good at this, I get paid a lot to be really good at it, but. You should only work with people you want to work with. Because you like them and you trust them. Not because your friend made you.”

He stopped again, unsure how to actually make himself form the words, _I want you to like me. I want you to trust me._  It seemed like such an obvious thing to want that saying it out loud sounded ridiculous.

Elliot was beginning to think that he was, in fact, completely ridiculous.

After another long moment, Hazel said, “Elliot, I do like you. Most of the time. I don’t know if I trust you. I don’t know if I should after last night.”

“Oh,” said Elliot, stomach sinking. “Okay. That’s. That’s fair.”

Hazel sighed. “But this? Here? This is a good start.”

Elliot nodded. He could work with that, he thought. He’d have to.

She sat down on a nearby park bench and patted the seat beside her. “For what it’s worth, drama notwithstanding,” she said, “I think you’ve done a great job with the podcast. And now you absolutely are going to teach me all of these engagement stats. In the next—” she checked her watch—“hour.”

“Say no more, my liege,” said Elliot, and they went to work.

  
  
  
  


Once Hazel had gone, Elliot was alone, and it was the kind of alone where all the uneasy feelings he’d been putting off during the meeting with Hazel swamped him at once. He ran through the mental checklist of items he had to complete as part of his mission to unbreak everything, and since most of them involved making amends to people who weren’t currently returning his texts, he zoned in on the one item he had only added in his head: _want Jonah better_.

Elliot’s secret favorite part of _Clueless_ was the part where Cher decided that instead of giving other people makeovers, she was going to make over herself. Operation Want Jonah Better would be useless, he decided, if he didn’t learn to want other people better, too. And that meant he wasn’t just going to apologize to everyone and move on. He was going to want them _all_ better—everyone in his friends group, and everyone, ever. Operation Want Jonah Better was really Operation Want _People_ Better.

Except it was 11 am on a Saturday in the late spring in downtown Boston, and Elliot didn’t really know how to start being a better person, so he wandered across the street to Quincy Market and sat on a bench and watched the tourists, trying to observe their habits. There was a line buying duck tour tickets, and Elliot watched them, thinking of what a painfully touristy thing to do it was, such an embarrassing thing to want to—

Except he had been on a duck tour once, on a field trip in the fourth grade. His mother had chaperoned, and he remembered having a fabulous time leaning out the window to quack at the pedestrians they passed. He had _loved_ the duck tour, he remembered suddenly, and he hadn’t thought about that in years, and instead he was sitting on a bench on a beautiful day judging people who just wanted to have fun, and enjoy themselves, and quack at some pedestrians.

 _Should I go on a duck tour?_ He texted Jane.

 _Why would you need to go on a duck tour?_ Jane replied. _What kind of shenanigan is this?_

 _No shenanigan_ , Elliot wrote back, because it didn’t feel like it was. Or else it was a shenanigan to avoid shenanigans, which...was too much of an ontological nightmare to parse through. He texted instead, _Gave Hazel all of the podcast info. Have a great meeting!_

And then he got in the line for the duck tour tickets.

  
  


Their duck was named Faneuil Holly, and Elliot told himself he found that pun endearing instead of painful. The entire front of the duck was crowded with squealing children and exhausted parents. The middle of the duck was occupied by teenagers who looked sullen at being dragged onto the tour and parents who looked sullen at having teenagers. Elliot sat in the very back, partly because he hoped it would make him less noticeable and partly because there was no room anywhere else. Just before the boat took off, one last family scrambled on and sat on the benches nearest Elliot: mother, father, two teenaged girls, who all said, “Hi,” to him in greeting.

Elliot boggled at them—who said _hi_ to people—and then heard himself say, "Hi," back.

They smiled and Elliot tried to look casual and relaxed, in the back of a duck tour boat, by himself. Instead of looking pathetic, which was what he really suspected he looked like.

The guy who was going to drive the boat stood in the front of it and said, “I am your con-DUCK-tor,” playing the hell out of the pun and blowing a duck call in case they might have missed it.

The children at the front of the duck boat cheered at this.

Then the con-duck-tor—Elliot made himself think of it exactly that way, as punishment for his previous undue preoccupation with aesthetic—went over safety briefings, and then explained to everyone how they would have to quack at pedestrians whenever he sounded the duck call. And then they all had to practice quacking effectively. Everyone around him threw themselves enthusiastically into quacking. Elliot considered coming up with some reason to get off the duck tour—he clearly had not thought this through—and then it was too late.

Elliot knew most of what the con-duck-tor was saying about Boston, so he didn’t have to pay attention very closely, and so instead he watched the city go by and tried to see it from this completely different perspective, a tourist there for a few days at most, trying to see as much as you could. Elliot had spent a lot of his time in Boston going to the same places, over and over, and now he suddenly wondered why he’d never even gone to see, say, John Hancock’s grave. He’d never ridden a swan boat through the Public Garden. He’d never been to Old North Church.

The duck boat spent a lot of time stuck in Boston traffic, idling at red lights, and the con-duck-tor kept blowing his duck call, and Elliot, wondering why the fuck he was so worried about doing this, leaned out of the window and quacked. Most of the Boston crowd on the street didn’t even look up, although a few did wave at the boat indulgently.

Eventually, they reached the part of the tour when the duck tour needed to convert entirely into boat mode so it could sail along the Charles. This was a process, during which they paused by the river and the con-duck-tor made the adjustments and the duck-tourists began talking amongst themselves.

Which was when the teenaged girl sitting across from him said, “This is pretty cool that it goes in the water, too. Have you ever done anything like this before?”

Elliot looked at her, smiling sunnily, looking _so excited_ to be on a duck boat, and Elliot said, “Yeah, actually, when I was a kid. They let you drive it for a little while on the river. You should volunteer.”

The girl beamed and said to her parents seated in front of her, “Did you hear what he said? Maybe we’ll get to drive the boat!”

Her sister—Elliot assumed—said to him, “Do you have to know how to drive a boat? Emily has no idea how to drive a boat.”

“It can’t be that different from driving a car,” said the one who was apparently called Emily.

“You barely know how to do that, either,” said her sister gleefully.

“Ugh,” said Emily, and rolled her eyes.

Their parents said in distracted unison, “Stop it.”

Emily and her sister both looked at him and rolled their eyes again, like he was in on the secret of how silly parents were.

Then Emily said, “Did you drive the boat when you did this as a kid?”

“No,” Elliot said. “There wasn’t time. There were too many volunteers.”

“Aww, that’s sad,” said Emily’s sister. “You should drive the boat this time.”

“That’s okay,” said Elliot. “I’m proud of myself for even being on a duck boat. I’m thinking I’ll save driving the duck boat for next time.”

“Oh, are you scared of boats?” asked Emily’s sister.

“No,” said Elliot, “I’m scared of…” And then had no idea how the fuck to end that sentence. He went with, “Maybe I’m scared of everything,” which was just the sort of thing you clearly should say to a perfect stranger, this was why Bostonians didn’t talk to strangers.

But instead the girls’ mother turned around and said, “That’s just adulthood. I keep trying to warn those two of that, and they don’t believe me.”

And then the girls’ father held out his hand and said, “I’m Jim.”

And that was how Elliot somehow made himself new friends on his duck tour?

But once Jim and his wife Lisa and Emily and Hannah started talking to him, they didn’t seem inclined to stop. They were from Missouri. They thought Boston was beautiful. Emily totally wanted to go to school there. Lisa thought it was a little far. Elliot said honestly that it was a great place to go to school but also he had grown up there so it hadn’t been far from his parents. They asked about what school he’d gone to, what his major had been, what he did now.

And then, having been asked all those questions, Elliot thought probably he should ask things in return, so he learned about how Emily had crashed her car into a fence literally the night before they had left for their Boston vacation, and how Hannah wanted to be a chef and her favorite show was _Chopped_ , and how Lisa’s mom had to get hip replacement surgery, and how Jim would totally buy a boat if he lived somewhere like Boston, that must be the _life_.

And then they were going to Boston Public Garden to ride the swan boats and Elliot had just been thinking how he wanted to ride the swan boats, so he tagged along under the guise of providing them with directions, and Hannah and Emily took a selfie of the three of them waiting in line for the swan boats, the Public Garden’s picturesque willows in the background, and posted it on Facebook and tagged him, and so Elliot friended them because it only seemed polite, and then he shared the image to his own Facebook, because, well, why not, and then Elliot sat up in the front of the swan boat with Lisa and learned all about exactly how much stuff a fanny pack could carry. It was an impressive amount of stuff.

And then when they got off the swan boats, they wanted lobster rolls, and so Elliot took them to the Barking Crab, and they sat outside in the sun, and the seagulls swooped around them, and Lisa said to Elliot, “Your city is really so pretty,” and Elliot thought, yeah, it kind of was, but maybe not for any of the reasons he’d actually thought.

Elliot said to the girls, “So, Hannah and Emily, you must get _Pretty Little Liars_ references all the time,” without even thinking about it, because it was the kind of day where he was just _doing_ things, no shenanigan plan in place.

Hannah and Emily gasped.

Hannah said, “ _So_ much, you have no idea. But it’s our favorite show, though. I mean, it’s terrible, but it’s amazing.”

“Do you watch _Pretty Little Liars_?” Emily asked.

And Elliot said, “Yes. Yes, I watch _Pretty Little Liars_.”

“Who is A?” Emily asked. “What do you think?”

“Is there even an A?” Hannah asked. “Or is A just, like, a figment of these girls’ imagination?”

“Ha,” said Elliot. “I like how you think. There probably is no A. Probably the entire show is a dream. It’s all Alison’s nightmare or something.”

“If Alison’s dreaming all of this, does that make Alison God?” asked Hannah.

“Do you think Alison’s in control?” Elliot countered. “I mean, it’s a nightmare, right? Who’s in control of their nightmares?”

“I don’t get why anyone even trusts Alison anymore,” Emily said frankly. “I mean, would you trust her?”

“Well,” Elliot considered. “Maybe she changed. People can change.”

Emily snorted. “Not always for the better.”

“I don’t know,” said Elliot. “Maybe things got complicated. Things get complicated a lot more quickly than you might realize. I mean, you think you’ve got everything under control until suddenly you don’t and then you try to alienate everyone in your life who’s important to you because you’re an idiot.”

Which had sounded a lot more detached in his head. Once that speech was delivered, basically all the Missourians at the table just stared at him.

And then Hannah said, “Did you have a fight with your girlfriend? Is that why you were on the duck tour alone?”

“Hannah!” Lisa said, sounding aghast.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Hannah said, pulling out her phone. “What’s her name? We’ll message her on Facebook and vouch for how sorry you are about the whole thing.”

“No,” Elliot said, sighing. “Don’t. It’s not even straightforward like that. It’s like...I fought with _everyone_. And anyway it would be a boyfriend. I mean, it’s not anyone, right now, because I ruined everything, but it would have been a boyfriend. Or it could have been. If things had gone differently.”

“What’s his name?” asked Hannah.

“Jonah” said Elliot.

“Wow,” said Emily almost immediately. “He’s hot.”

“What?” said Elliot, and then realized instantly that he’d friended these girls on Facebook, and the most recent pictures he’d posted to his Facebook, all posted in the guise of promoting the podcast, were of his friends rehearsing—but mostly of Jonah. She was currently looking at the photo he’d snapped of Jonah looking at him over the piano in his rehearsal the night they’d gone on their not-date.

“Oooh, he is,” Hannah concurred.

Elliot watched, upside-down, as she scrolled through more photos of Jonah on Elliot’s Facebook.

“You have a lot of photos of him,” Hannah remarked after a second.

“I do, don’t I?” said Elliot. He had taken a _ridiculous_ number of photos of Jonah over the past few weeks. How had he never realized that before? “He’s...photogenic. I like to take pictures of him.”

“You _took_ all of these?” said Emily.

“I mean,” said Elliot defensively, “not in a stalker-y way. He knew I was taking them.”

Hannah thumbed back to the picture from the rehearsal. She said, “Aww, Elliot. He loves you, too.”

“He... I don’t know. He’s really... not sure if he wants to be with me.”

“Look at how he looks at you.” Emily turned her phone toward Elliot. Elliot really didn’t need to be reminded of the way Jonah had been looking at him in that moment, his eyes warm and fond as he watched Elliot talking to his students. _That was the way he looked at me when he thought I was becoming someone better_ , Elliot thought.

“You should talk to him,” Emily said. “I bet you can fix things.”

“I’m trying,” Elliot said. “It’s complicated. I fucked some things up, and then I fucked some more things up, and should I not have used the word ‘fuck,’ sorry,” he said to Lisa and Jim.

Jim just said seriously, “So un-fuck them.”

“Look how miserable you are,” Emily said. “You have to talk to him. Otherwise it’ll be like One Direction.”

“One Direction?” Elliot said.

“On permanent hiatus. Forever. Where’s the closure in that? Like, just break up,” said Emily.

“You don’t want to be like One Direction, Elliot, do you?” asked Hannah.

“Well, no,” said Elliot, “but I don’t want to break up with him, either, we never even got to be _together,_  really. Before yesterday I didn’t really understand how I felt, and he was waiting for me to figure it out, but before that really happened I kind of snapped and broke things anyway.”

“Oh, my God,” said Hannah. “You’re totally the Zayn.”

“Oh, my God,” Elliot realized. “I _am_ the Zayn. I collapsed under the weight of trying to pretend to be someone that I wasn’t.”

“And now you don’t know who to be because you were pretending for so long,” said Emily.

“How did I turn out to be the Zayn?” Elliot wondered. “I always thought I was the Harry!”

“Look,” said Hannah. “Maybe we should talk to your boyfriend for you.”

“No,” said Elliot. “I don’t think so. That seems unnecessary.”

“You don’t sound very good at talking to him,” Hannah pointed out.

Elliot couldn’t help but laugh. “We actually talk all the time. We’re _so good_ at talking. We just use, like, elevated metaphors as stand-ins for us. Actually, we’re probably really weird to other people.”

“How’s this?” asked Emily, and then read off her phone. “Hi! We’re with your boyfriend right now and he’s very sad, he says he's like Zayn and he had to break out of the mold because he couldn't take trying to be someone he wasn't anymore.”

“I mean,” said Elliot uncertainly, “it’s accurate but--”

“Facebook message sent,” Emily announced.

“Oh, God,” said Elliot. “How did we get on this subject? Can we go back to talking about the contents of your fanny pack, Lisa? How many first aid supplies did you say you’d managed to stuff in there?”

“You know, I can recommend you some One Direction fic,” said Hannah. “If you need help working through your Zayn issues.”

“I don’t know that I have Zayn _issues_.”

“You definitely have Zayn issues,” Hannah told him.

“Oh, my God,” exclaimed Emily. “Elliot, your _boyfriend_.”

Elliot blinked at her, confused. “What?”

“His _response_. You are like _star-crossed_.”

“What did he say?” Elliot asked, trying to snatch her phone.

She dodged him and read aloud, “Remind Zayn that his actions affect more people than just him, and his mold-breaking came at the worst possible moment for the rest of the group.”

Which was... such a Jonah response that Elliot missed him _painfully_.

Hannah said, “I don’t know. He does sound kinda miffed.”

And suddenly Elliot was annoyed—annoyed at missing Jonah when he should have been with Jonah _from the beginning_ , annoyed at sitting here having to have teenage girls help with the mess of his love life—and he said, “Right. Tell Harry that Zayn is no longer confused about who and what he wants, and he’s going to make it up to him, and to the rest of the group.”

“This is like the world’s best fic,” Hannah told him. “You’d have a million reads on Wattpad.”

“Tell Zayn that Harry understands his confusion, but wishes Zayn had realized his feelings before he decided to lash out at all of their friends,” Emily read out loud.

Elliot winced and said, “See, that’s—”

But Emily resumed reading, “And also tell him that the meeting went well and the presentation was good.” Emily looked up. “Does that make sense? I don’t think that’s about One Direction.”

And Elliot grinned, because if Jonah was sending him meeting updates, then he couldn’t be completely, entirely furious with him. It wasn’t much, but he’d take it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it makes sense.”

  
  


By the time Elliot parted from lunch with the Missourians, Hannah and Emily had both friend-requested Jane and Caroline on Facebook because they’d decided based on the way Elliot kept talking about them both that they were probably the coolest people ever, and Jane had responded instantly with a chatty Facebook message, and Caroline had added them and sent them an invite to a closed Binder for YA fans, which Elliot didn’t even know about, but just made her that much cooler in their eyes, which was as it should be.

Lisa had promised to go straight home and bake Elliot something called a chess pie and send it to him, since apparently Missouri had pastry he’d never even heard of. Jim had friended Elliot’s dad on Facebook too in order to ask him about boat-buying in the odd event that he ever actually lived near water, and Hannah and Emily and Elliot had all vociferously agreed with each other that Dan being Gossip Girl was complete bullshit and canonically impossible, so all in all it was one of the most productive days Elliot had had in a while.

Except that the day was just starting to enter dusk, and Jane had texted him to tell him she and all the others were still out celebrating podcast things, so Elliot wandered over to the Harvard Square gastrobistro he and Jane liked and sat angstily at the bar ordering pink drinks and called Caroline to come drink Amarula sunsets with him, except that Caroline was apparently at the podcast celebration with Nicholas, of course.

Two more Amarula sunsets and some serious bartender side-eying — he was pretty sure it was the same side-eyeing Frenchys bartender from months earlier, and the bartender clearly remembered him as the ‘disturbing number of Frenchys guy’ and was now adding ‘disturbing number of Amarula sunsets’ to the list, which was just _so_ unfair — he gave up and called Blake.

“Hey,” said Blake, picking up on the second ring. “What’s with all the waterfowl?”

“You’re not mad?” said Elliot, thrown.

“Oh, no, I’m annoyed,” said Blake. “You were kind of a dick, everyone’s mad at you, et cetera et cetera. But seriously, waterfowl. And like. Are you fucking a pair of underage twins? What’s actually happening on your Facebook page right now?”

“Blake,” said Elliot gratefully, “You are the only person I know who would prioritize gossiping about social media over a potentially friendship-ending public meltdown.”

“False,” said Blake. “ _Everyone_ prioritizes gossiping about social media over friends drama. _Especially_ if there’s underage twin-fucking happening.”

“There’s no underage fucking,” said Elliot. “Gross. I met a nice Midwestern family on a duck tour and I was an adult role model. I’m pretty sure I befriended _Republicans_.”

“Well great for you, Joe Biden, I’ll put you down for 2020,” said Blake. “Hazel was so pissed at you.”

“Is she still pissed at me?” said Elliot.

“I dunno,” said Blake. “I think she’s happy with the world in general since the podcast meeting went so well. But I did get to bond with Jonah over what a dick you were to everybody, so thanks for that.”

“Incredible,” said Elliot sincerely.

“I could go to the podcast shindig and be your eyes and ears on the ground,” said Blake. “But if I do, you not only have to _come_ to my next open mic night but you have to actively applaud and laugh like you think I’m Jerry Seinfeld.”

“I don’t actually think Jerry Seinfeld has been funny since 1998 or so?” said Elliot.

“The point is, like, I want to see groveling,” said Blake. “Oh, and you’re gonna help me pick out whatever abstract art bullshit I do for the next party.”

“I... can do that,” said Elliot.

“I’m thinking maybe some kind of light show?” said Blake. “Pending zoning regulations, of course.”

“Of course,” said Elliot, draining his glass. “Hey. What did Jonah say?”

“About you?” Elliot could actually hear Blake shrug over the phone, which was a uniquely Blake attribute. “Just that you self-destructed in classic Elliot fashion, and hopefully that will be the only time it happens.”

“It will be,” Elliot said fervently.

“You two are fucking, right? Or were fucking, before all this?” Elliot put a hand over his face and nodded before remembering that Blake couldn’t see him nod.

“Sure,” he said. “I mean. It was more than fucking, but yes.”

Blake snorted. “Then you better hope you don’t piss him off again. Right after Jonah came back and did that one-man play that got the _Globe_ profile, his parents tried to donate a bunch of money to the arts guild that was putting it on.”

“His parents tried to reconcile with him?” Elliot sat up. “How did I not know this?”

“I don’t think he told many people. Nicholas and I just found out because he mentioned it that one time we all had drinks together right before the podcast.”

“What happened? Did he accept the money?”

“Jonah told us he cut the check up and sent it back to them, enclosed in a card covered in a rainbow.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” said Blake. “Like, after he left the Eggplant, that should have been it for him, dude. He gave you a second chance he didn’t even give his parents.”

“You’re saying I’m not going to get a third?” Elliot ordered another cocktail, manfully ignoring the bartender’s grimace.

“No, I’m just saying he’s, like, kind of a badass. I bet working for him would be awesome.”

“ _That’s_ why you want him to get you a job?”  Elliot made a face at his phone. “Because he’s a badass?”

“Well, yeah,” said Blake. “I mean, I want to get hired, but also, Jonah’s, like. He’s super networked and he doesn’t give a _fuck_.”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “Classic Jonah.”  

He drank his cocktail and thought about Jonah. He scrolled through his tagged Facebook photos of Jonah and tried to see them the way Hannah and Emily had seen them, but he just saw... Jonah.

Elliot spent a long time staring, and thinking, and staring, and thinking, and trying to untangle how the fuck he was going to grow up enough for Jonah, he of No Second Chances, to give him a _third_ chance. And then after thinking about this for far too long, he said, out loud, “Fuck this,” and checked Flixter and decided to go watch _Despicable Me 3_ , because he had no idea what _Despicable Me_ was, but he knew that he probably deserved to go sit alone in a movie theatre alongside sticky children screaming at an animated movie about obnoxious yellow small things.

So he did.

“What the fuck,” he said two hours later, emerging from the experience blinking into the bright scouring light of day.

“Language!” said the woman next to him, covering the ears of the child to which she’d just exposed a film about a cheerfully sociopathic horde of evil-doers.

“I mean,” he said. “What the heck.”

“Did you enjoy the film?” she asked.

“I would say it was a no-holds-barred adrenaline thrill ride,” said Elliot, “but I feel like its moral code is considerably suspect.”

“I know!” said the woman. “These movies are so much _fun_!”

“What the _heck_ ,” said Elliot again, thumbing open his Netflix app.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, roughly 90 minutes after that.

 _Did you know_ Minions _is all about a bunch of small yellow things in search of shenanigans?_ he texted Jonah before he could think better of it. _Only they discover that they aren’t happy until they apply their shenanigans to a higher purpose_? _What the fuck._

 _And the higher purpose is obeying Steve Carell?_ Jonah texted back.

 _I guess_ , said Elliot, and he sat thinking about shenanigans and applying shenanigans to a higher purpose until Jonah responded.

 _I expect you can put your wiles to a much higher purpose than that_.

Elliot thought: _Want people better_.

 _I’m working on it_ , he texted back.

  
  


He began Operation Want People Better the next morning, when he went to brunch with Jane and Caroline.

“My plane leaves at three,” Jane told them, “so that gives you, like, two hours or so to talk to me or whatever.”

“You’re so sure it’s gonna take the full two hours,” said Caroline, smirking.

“Yes,” said Jane, “I am absolutely sure, mainly because I’ve not had a chance to talk to you yet this weekend, which means I basically haven’t talked to you since March because texts don’t count, so two hours clearly is _barely_ enough.”

Caroline shot her a look of fondness, and Elliot recognized that look because he felt it for both of them every day.

He thought about how Jane hadn’t known how to tell him the things that were really happening in her life, and how unacceptable that was, and then the thought occurred to him that if Jane, his dearest person, had felt that way, then Caroline almost certainly felt that way, too.

Then, in the middle of wondering how he could fix it, he remembered Jonah snapping at him to shut up, and decided on the spot that he wasn’t going to say a word throughout brunch; instead he was going to listen to both of them, just... shut up and listen.

Which was around the time Jane kicked him under the table, which was probably code for ‘stop looking like someone murdered your puppy,’ so Elliot shook himself awake and ordered a bellini and then nursed it dutifully and stayed quiet while Caroline told them all about the new photography lighting class she was taking.

Caroline had been taking photography classes for years, and as far as Elliot was aware she’d never gotten anything more out of it than a few thousand Instagram followers; but now suddenly she was telling them excitedly about lens length and aperture and gel filters and having to lug around these giant heavy-ass lighting kits on loan from the studio, oversized lighting umbrellas and super-expensive lamps and something called a softbox; and how the more she shot outdoors, the more she kept realizing that she just kept wanting to shoot the sides of buildings instead of people or grass or trees, not only because she hated trying to pre-plan color levels and digital enhancements like her teachers were constantly urging her to, but because she could get more desaturated images while using the flat building as a kind of canvas.

She loved the geometry, the way the buildings provided alternatives to grayscale photography. In short, she was getting into Brutalist photography, and she didn’t know where it was leading yet, but she was thinking seriously about doing professional photography shoots for real estate. In the meantime, it was weirding out her teachers and her family, because she kept showing them all these pictures of giant dead beige walls, and she thought it was the greatest.

And then Jane interjected that she had actually written a set of Google coding guidelines drawn from Brutalist principles, because Brutalist internet design was apparently a huge thing, and she and Caroline took the conversation in directions Elliot had never heard of, and at one point he started wondering if he should be taking notes—like, were they actually conducting some kind of business meeting and he’d missed the memo?

But Caroline and Jane seemed to really _like_ this stuff, and by the time they had segued into a discussion of whether Weird Twitter counted as a form of Brutalist social media because of its truncated linguistic usage, Elliot was having to forcibly bite back excited contributions to the conversation, and realizing that there was a sharp, analytical side to Caroline he’d had no idea even existed. Normally when he and Caroline got together they usually just got chatted about nothing, and he had no idea how or why that pattern or even formed. He’d always known she had a great eye for aesthetics and that was what made her seem so perfect for him once upon a time; but even though he, Elliot, was a social media expert they’d never ever talked about things like _Weird Twitter_. He had no idea Caroline was even into that kind of thing. But she was a photographer and an artist and she was constantly on social media; of course it made sense that she’d be into Weird Twitter and Brutalism and Glitch art and who knew what else.

After a little while, Jane brought up the subject of sexism in the tech industry. The Brutalism-based code guidelines she’d written had basically been forked to hell and overwritten, whatever that meant, and a branch repository written by a male coder based on her work had been the piece that got all the attention. And then she and Caroline started talking about imposter syndrome, and the challenges of being women in professions dominated by men, and Caroline mentioned the Binders, and they both started talking about how adorable Emily and Hannah were, and then Jane looked over at Elliot and said, “You haven’t said a word all brunch.”

“I know,” Elliot said, “It’s great.”

They exchanged glances. “Caroline, I will help you haul lighting kits all over Boston,” Elliot said. She beamed at him. “Jane, I will personally fly to Google and fight anyone who forks your repo and takes credit for it.”

“That’s a lovely thought,” said Jane. “You don’t need to defend me.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” he said.

“You didn’t really want to know,” said Jane. “But it’s okay, because I also didn’t really want to tell you.”

“Yeah,” said Caroline. “Men don’t usually want to hear women talking about their lives.”

“I do,” said Elliot. “I want to be somebody you want to tell.”

“Yeah,” said Jane. “I get that. It’s just, when we’re all together, we’ve always, all of us, engaged mainly on either one level of inconsequential banter and silliness, or another level of, like, pseudo-college intellectual debates. But I think, if I’ve understood this whole fucked-up last day and a half correctly, that’s put a secret strain on all of us, as a group. Because you don’t want just the banter and the debates, you want to _listen_. Or, even if you don’t want to, I think you need to. I think we all need to.”

“Blake just made us all pretend to be a band of folkloric murderers,” said Caroline. “I could use some normal boring conversation right about now.”

“Honestly,” said Jane, “Sometimes I get so tired of being ironic.”

“ _Jane_ ,” said Elliot, startled.

“What,” said Jane. “Like you don’t get tired of constantly judging everything and everyone? Where do you think this whole mess _came_ from? You were so busy trying to keep your ironic aesthetic distance from Jonah you didn’t even realize how drawn to him you really were.”

“I think,” said Elliot. “I think I let myself get so caught up in aesthetic judgments about people I forgot the aesthetic judgments were never _real_.”

“Well,” said Jane. “I think I let you.”

“No,” said Caroline. “We all let you, because you’re fun and clever and wry, and because you’re _so_ confident, Elliot, it’s hard to withstand you and your opinions. I always wondered how Jonah did it so easily.”

“But I think maybe,” said Jane, “we all lost some of our sweetness along the way.”

“I’m going to call you,” Elliot said suddenly, as Jane looked at her phone and blanched at the time. “I’m going to call you both all the time and just make you talk at me while I listen. I really am.”

Jane smiled.

“Well,” said Caroline, and she blushed. “I’ll put you on speaker, so you can listen to Nicholas, too.”

  
  
  


Elliot went home. Home remained lonely and empty and he hated it. How had he never noticed before how much he hated his own apartment? Or maybe he just... missed Nicholas’s. It seemed more likely that he just missed Nicholas’s. Especially Ian Purrtis. At some point, he was probably going to have to tell Nicholas that he needed to come over to his apartment in order to pet his cat. Probably breaking up with Ian Purrtis was going to be considerably more involved and drawn out than not-breaking up with Nicholas had ultimately been.

It wasn’t until he went to open Zillow to look for apartments that he remembered that his laptop, along with most of his suits and Blank Labels and tech stuff, were all still at Jonah’s. He sent Jonah a humiliating text and then fidgeted until Jonah responded telling him to come over. He pulled on a t-shirt and shorts, the most non-schemey, non-trainwreck outfit he could think of, and took the T out to Jonah’s apartment, because Jonah normally took the T, and building character probably meant using fewer exploitative car services, or something.

“Hi,” said Jonah, leaning in the doorway.

“Hi,” said Elliot. He looked up at Jonah, at the tiredness around his eyes, and thought, _You did that. You put those circles there by wanting him like a trainwreck_. Without conscious effort he tipped into Jonah’s space just enough so that the air between them became charged, the pull between them palpable, and Jonah bent towards him for one helpless moment before pulling himself away and inviting him inside.

“I’m going to start looking for my own apartment,” Elliot blurted, settling himself on Jonah’s couch. “Hence the need for the laptop. Well. And work stuff, I guess.”

Jonah poured Elliot a glass of water and sat gingerly on the arm of the couch as he drank it, floating him infuriatingly inane questions about where and how Elliot thought he might like to live—infuriating both because they were so politely benign and because Elliot genuinely had no idea how to answer them.

“I don’t know,” he confessed for the third or fourth time in a row. “I don’t really know... anything about what I want right now.” He shot Jonah an earnest look. “But I’m going to find out.”

Jonah looked back at him, his face impassive but at least not forbidding.

“I appreciate what you did for Hazel,” he said at last. “That was good of you. She appreciated it also.”

“It wasn’t enough,” said Elliot shortly.

“No,” said Jonah. “But a start.” He considered Elliot for a moment, and finally asked, “Would you be interested in siphoning a bit of good will?”

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Elliot said fervently.

“Well then,” Jonah said. “I’ve got an invitation to an upcoming networking shindig being sponsored by the local Equity chapter. It’s open to anyone with an Equity card, but the invite is transferable. I wondered if you might care to go in my place and take Blake as your plus one.”

“Why would I—oh,” said Elliot. “ _Oh_.”

“Precisely,” said Jonah. “You need not tell him who the invite originally belonged to. Let him think he magically arrived on the wings of serendipity.”

“Serendipity in a smoking jacket,” Elliot teased, and then had to order himself to stop being flirty when Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “Thank you. Blake would. He’d really like that.”

So far,  Jonah was better at doing Elliot’s atonement than Elliot was, and didn’t that just figure. He swallowed. “But I think he’d enjoy it better if he went with you. He really looks up to you. He said you’re a badass.”

“Well,” Jonah said, smirking. “He’s not wrong. But I was thinking you’d have a better shot at reining him in and preventing him from whoring himself out to every producer and publicist in attendance.”

“I haven’t had the best track record lately when it comes to reining in impolitic social behavior at parties,” Elliot said, turning red. “But I’ll do my best.”

“Blake will be fine, anyway,” said Jonah. “His particular brand of shamelessness plays well to the right audience. I’m sure a room full of producers will home in on him like ham radios in the wilderness picking up a numbers station.”

Elliot laughed again. “He does know how to hold a room once he’s gotten it. It’s like bringing a baby into a nursing home. It’s out of its element but nobody cares.”

“You, on the other hand,” said Jonah, “are so rarely out of your element that when you are, everyone knows it.”

Elliot drained his glass of water.

“There was one other thing that I remember about that day in Walden,” said Jonah. “And that’s how much you all seemed to have known each other forever, even though you’d really all just met not that long before. And I remember thinking how strange it was that I was among you, even though I was a little older, because I’d met you and Nicholas and you’d invited me along, and I’d invited Hazel, because we were all in theatre together and Hazel knew Caroline. And I was hoping I’d feel—well. Like I fit in, I guess.”

Elliot said, “You do,” and Jonah sent him a wry smile.

“I still feel that way,” he said. “Even though it’s a mark of insecurity, and even though all of my other friends from college have moved on and separated and gone about their lives.”

Elliot thought of him and Hazel confessing to each other that they’d each been trying to impress the other, and nodded.

“What I’m trying to say,” Jonah said, “is that I get why you want to hold onto your friends, and why you went out of your way to be a part of the podcast so you could stay close to Nicholas and to Jane and even the rest of us. We’re _yours_ , and we all found each other while we were each still finding ourselves, and even when you don’t understand us, you feel tied to us. You’re comfortable with us. And maybe that also makes it easier to take us for granted.”

Elliot thought about Jonah before college—no family support, having to rely entirely on the kindness of friends and strangers. “You don’t,” he said. “You don’t take anyone for granted.”

“No,” Jonah said simply. “And that includes you.”

Elliot swallowed. “I don’t think you’re wrong, about me getting too comfortable,” he said. “But I think also—the way I used to treat you and Kate and Hazel was about keeping my distance from you. It was about keeping you at arm’s length. Hazel told me I should make sure you knew that.”

Jonah blinked. “I think if this ordeal has taught us anything,” he said, “it’s that you go to great lengths to avoid your feelings.” Elliot winced.

Jonah added dryly, “And then implode when you can’t.”

Elliot looked up at him. “I’m not going to avoid things anymore,” he said earnestly. “I’m serious about you, about this.”

Jonah bit his lip. “Elliot—”

“I know, I know it’s not a good idea to rush back into this,” Elliot persisted. “I have... so much work to do to fix things. I have to work on myself first, and I have to repair all these relationships with the people we both love, and I have to, like, find an apartment and find my independence away from you or Nicholas.” He took a breath. “I know that means I run the risk of losing you, because you aren’t going to wait on me. But I have to take it, because I... I want to be in a real relationship with you, not just crazy amounts of sex, and I want to be a terrifying adult with you. So I have to go learn to be a terrifying adult on my own first.”

Jonah took in this speech without a word, but his eyes were warm on Elliot’s face, and Elliot thought wildly that he could do this if he could just have that look from Jonah, somehow, on a regular basis.

“I think,” Jonah said eventually, “that sounds like a good idea.” He made a strange, abortive movement, as though he had begun to reach to touch Elliot’s face and then stopped himself. “And I think—it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” he said. “I’m still upset with you, and I’m still not sure what to expect from you right now. But Elliot, we can work on being friends for a while. I’m not sure we’ve ever really tried that before.”

Elliot bit back his immediate reaction to this idea, which was that being friends with Jonah was a horrible, terrible idea, he had years of experiencing the constant torture of trying to just be friends with Jonah, and look how that had ended. But he knew Jonah was right—they’d never just been _friendly_ with each other on an ongoing basis—and also it was an unexpected peace offering that would allow him to stay close with only a modicum of awkwardness.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I want—that. With you.”

  
  


The first order of business of Elliot and Jonah’s new friendship was making a list of what criteria Elliot wanted in an apartment, which they wrote down on Jonah’s kitchen whiteboard because Jonah was the kind of person who had a kitchen whiteboard. When he’d written down everything, like one of those fussy couples on HGTV who insisted on getting their open-plan kitchens _and_ their mudrooms, the overwhelming takeaway was that what he wanted was nothing like Nicholas’s Quincy apartment. Nicholas’s apartment was homey and cozy and full of soft worn furniture and soft warm textures and golden-brown-beige colors and knit patterns that made it feel like a visit to someone’s cheery grandmother. And Elliot had always loved that; it was perfectly Nicholas.

But left to his own devices, Elliot wanted sleek and modern; he wanted minimalism, white and greige with splashes of color and metallic finishes and tile flooring and an open island with bar stools and high ceilings and—

“You do realize you actually have to _afford_ this apartment,” said Jonah, and Elliot debated and took the bar off his list of must-haves.

“Well, how do you afford yours?” asked Elliot, looking covetously at Jonah’s stacked washer and dryer.

“I budget,” said Jonah in an odd voice.

Elliot eyed him. He didn’t appear to be joking.

“...Budget,” Elliot echoed.

“Do I need to google it for you,” Jonah deadpanned.

“No, I’m familiar with the concept,” said Elliot, strangled.

The discussion about apartments was supposed to be simple. But Jonah asked questions Elliot hadn’t even considered, questions about what he needed the space for beyond just working remotely, what he wanted to grow into while he was living there, and somehow the conversation spun into odd and surprising directions. They talked about the possibility of getting a living room large enough to have game nights, because Elliot was under the impression that game nights were dorky and sincere, and he thought it might be a method of uniting their friends group around something other than banter and shenanigans. They talked about how much Elliot missed Ian Purrtis, and whether it would be a dumb idea for him to get a cat of his own, or whether the cat would just feel like a paltry substitute cat, or whether Elliot should even be responsible for another living thing.

At some point Jonah moved to sitting cross-legged on the couch facing Elliot, and then they ordered Chinese, and the hours wore on. They talked about the string of shitty apartments Jonah lived in when he first moved to the city on his own; the landlord who canceled his lease just before he moved in, the landlord who took his security deposit and then mysteriously dropped out of sight before giving him the key to his place, the roommate he’d had his freshman year who’d stolen most of his stuff, the roommate who’d tried to rent out his living room on AirBNB—

“Oh, wait,” Jonah said. “That was you.”

“I was an excellent roommate,” Elliot grinned.

“You tried to frighten away all my one night stands,” said Jonah.

“I did not!”

“One of them asked me if you were possessed because, and I quote, ‘he was sitting on the kitchen counter glaring at me like that little kid from _The Grudge_ when I came in.’”

“I was maybe a little jealous,” Elliot admitted, and somehow his fingers had become laced in Jonah’s own, and character growth was important and all, but he had no intention of removing them, and Jonah’s smile was a warm secret he wanted to tuck away and keep forever.

They talked about how Jane moving away had left Elliot feeling at such loose ends all spring, how he had known on some level he was using the podcast to avoid dealing with how much he missed her, but had also thought doing the podcast would be a way to keep things from changing. They talked about how much Elliot hated change, and how Jonah had learned to deal with sudden change the hard way, and about how the shock of his disownment and his sudden independence had swallowed up most of his first years in Boston, how he’d been too busy trying to keep his head above water and figure out adulthood to really even be mad at his parents at first. Elliot’s parents, on the other hand, still tried to pave the way for him, tried to make things as easy as possible, even when Elliot didn’t necessarily want them to.

They talked about how Elliot had gotten a business degree primarily because it was easy and he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and he thought that would make his lawyer dad happy and satisfied with him; and then they talked about the thread of an idea that had been running through Elliot’s brain ever since their walk along the Charles River that he should find a place near BU, because BU offered a master’s degree in directing, and Jonah said, “ _Elliot_ ,” and, “ _Yes_ ,” and ran his thumb over the inside of Elliot’s wrist and drew in a halting breath—

—and suddenly they were kissing, and Jonah’s arms slid around him, and Elliot gasped and opened up and melted against him, and he was never going to take this for granted ever again.  

“Please let me stay,” he whispered against Jonah’s mouth. “I know I still have so much growing up to do, and that I’m a giant mess—”

Jonah cupped Elliot’s face in his hands, and Elliot said, helpless, “but I think I want to be _your_ mess. And I—”

“I love you,” said Jonah.

Elliot gasped. Jonah kissed him, and then said fiercely when they broke apart, “It’s useless to talk about waiting on you because I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to see other people, I don’t want to watch you careen around trying to become a better person overnight without me. I want you, I want my hands on you, I want you even when you’re being completely ridiculous and driving me up the wall—”

“I’ll be so good, I swear,” Elliot babbled, curling his fingers through Jonah’s hair and squirming closer. “I’ll want you so much better, Jonah, I promise. I’ll, I’ll go on respectable dates with you and I’ll make budgets and make you lunch on days when you have back-to-back rehearsals and I’ll go to all your swank theatre parties and we will have the world’s most responsible adult relationship.”

Jonah laughed. “That sounds like a complete disaster in the making.”

“Are you excited?”

“Tremendously.” Jonah traced Elliot’s forehead with his fingertips. “We still need to be careful. Be—steady if not slow.”

“I’ll be steady,” Elliot promised. “I’ll be the most steady—this relationship will be the smoothest Amtrak ride ever, no trainwrecks, nonstop all the way to Manhattan, you’ll see.”

“As usual, you are speaking French to a pineapple,” said Jonah. And then he laughed, and everything felt amazing. Everything was wonderful.

“And besides, technically we did try being friends for a while,” Elliot added. “We were friends for about three and a half hours.”

“Ah,” said Jonah. “And no one required therapy or upended their current living arrangements. A complete success.”

Elliot grinned and pulled Jonah tighter against him. “Jonah,” he said, touching his face. “You make me so happy. I’m going to tell you every day.”

“You’re going to tell me _and_ show me,” said Jonah, nuzzling his chin. “We’re going to show each other. It’s going to be magnificent.”

“Greatest show on earth,” Elliot promised him.

Jonah pulled back and appraised him. “I think you mean the greatest shenanigan,” he said with a wink, and he bore Elliot down to the couch and got the game underway.

 


End file.
